Author Archives: jfeklund

Walker 2009: Protected-Area Monitoring Dilemmas: a New Tool to Assess Success

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Protected areas are not always successful in conserving biodiversity. Unsustainable resource extraction and illegal activities inside protected areas often occur. Can factors that make protected areas vulnerable be identified and best management strategies found?

Studies addressing these questions should be of interest to conservation biologists. According to Walker the importance of law enforcement and monitoring in the successful management of protected areas has been underscored throughout the conservation literature, even if many empirical studies have found them to be strongly correlated with resource condition. Walker addresses these questions with a law-enforcement and monitoring game-theory model from the political science and commons literature. The three key factors evaluated are:

  • cost of monitoring rule breakers
  • benefit of catching a rule breaker
  • probability of catching a rule breaker

Assigning these variables realistic values proved to be difficult but even with crude values the variables had a remarkably strong predictive power and agreed surprisingly well with the reported outcomes in 116 protected areas from the peer-reviewed literature. The main finding was that conservation is unlikely to succeed if the cost of monitoring were greater than the product of the probability to catch a rule breaker and the benefit of doing so. Surprisingly, for me, was that the variables driving the monitor’s decision are those that most often determine the outcome because the resource users make their decisions according to what they think the monitors will do. So, by using either carrot or stick strategies to punish or motivate resource users little will be achieved in terms of stopping illegal use. This is valuable to keep in mind.

I think many of us felt the paper was a bit heavy to read because we were not familiar with the methodology or the terminology. The structure of first presenting the model in depth and then using it to predict case study outcomes can be confusing but for my part I really appreciated that so much space was given to explain the theoretical model in depth. It was also interesting how very different terminology political scientists and conservation biologist are using and this might in some respect mirror how we value things (e.g. the paper consistently talked about “resources” instead of for example “biodiversity features” etc.).

One concern we had with the paper was that it only considered top-down managed protected areas (which in a way was useful for us doing conservation because most national parks and reserves fall under this category even though other forms of management exist). Of course, everything cannot be covered in just one publication and the topic was clearly defined from the beginning. Related to this it would also have been interesting to hear more about the outcomes (in F&G) when transferring monitoring to the community, the so-called “pass the buck” strategy.

We also discussed if the reality is this black and white? And somehow this lead us to consider the problems we have even in Finland with illegal poaching of wolves and how this, according to the predictions of the paper, should be solved.

Conclusion: We agree that conservation biologists should be more aware of the work done by political scientists to solve monitoring dilemmas. In fact, we were so inspired by this new angle of approach that we decided to read some more of the references by Ostrom and others (we also recollected that we touched upon this subject already in November 2009 when reading about socio-ecological systems, see previous contribution by Heini).

Link to the paper:

Walker, K. L. 2009. Protected-Area Monitoring Dilemmas: a New Tool to Assess Success. Conservation Biology 23: 1294-1303.

doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01203.x

Wright et al. 2009: The Future of Tropic…

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Wright et al. 2009: The Future of Tropical Species on a Warmer Planet

This is a paper we decided to read because some papers we have previously read cited it. We thought the topic was interesting because it highlighted the tropical areas and the tropical species in relation to climate change. The authors suggest that tropical species may be particularly sensitive to global warming because of a number of factors, such as a species’ sensitivity to temperature change and proximity to cooler refuges. The analysis was done for the extant mammals and with a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Unfortunately the paper was very heavy to read and included many different aspects with land cover types, distances to potential cool refuges and habitat associations. It was difficult to keep track of what underlying data and assumptions that were behind the figures. This meant that although the paper did have some interesting points, the authors did not manage to open them up for the reader. One issue that was not discussed at all was the fact that although tropical species might be poorly adapted to changes in temperature, they are likely to be highly adapted to changes is precipitation. The paper also did not address the question what will happen with the areas where there now has been high species richness and centers of speciation, i.e. what will come in the place of the tropical species? We also saw some concerns about technical things, such as having 1960s temperatures but land use data from the 2000, and using annual mean temperatures for the analyses. Additionally, when looking at the map in figure 5 some of use pointed out that it merely seems to be a question about altitude, rather than latitude. Especially when comparing the figure to maps of present day topography of the earth. The green areas (i.e. those with least distance to refuges) are all situated in mostly mountainous areas, and do not, as the authors claim, seem to be much related to latitudes.

Wright, S.J., Muller-Landau, H.C., Schipper, J. 2009: The Future of Tropical Species on a Warmer Planet. Conservation Biology 23: 1418-1426.

doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01337.x

Hanson et al. 2009: Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots

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The paper deals with an important issue: warfare is likely to affect biodiversity conservation. The authors state very correctly that “conservation efforts are only as sustainable as the social and political context within which they take place”. This essay-type paper deals with the implications war might have on biodiversity, both negative and positive and direct and indirect. Their main result is that over 90 % of armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 took place within countries containing biodiversity hotspots. Some quantitative numbers on negative consequences by war on biodiversity are reviewed (decrease in forest cover and coastal mangroves in Vietnam, poaching in Virunga National Park) but otherwise the authors merely present possible links on how war potentially can affect biodiversity. Such examples include increased military expenditures at the expense of conservation budgets, or possible positive effects through buffer zones between opposing forces or reduced economic activity enabling recovery of exploited natural resources.

Finally, the authors draw some conclusions and make some recommendations for conservation policy. Of these I think it is worth mentioning two: 1. Conservation organizations should not only work in stable regions, but also develop programs in war-torn regions, if biodiversity is to be secured. 2. Biodiversity conservation should be integrated into military, reconstruction and humanitarian programmes in the conflict zones. In our discussion we touched upon this very important issue, which is something we have been discussing also related to other works (Smith et al. 2003. Nature 426: 67-70.): should conservation efforts be focused to regions where the success likelihood is greatest or should it also be directed to ameliorate root causes of the problems?

We also discussed some possible problems with the study in question and think that the issue could have been problemized more and the analysis itself could have incorporated some more aspects. One such thing could have been the duration of the armed conflicts or some temporal trend of funding: what happened to conservation funding when a conflict was initiated? Some of us were also concerned that some key references of war dynamics and war causes were missing. Another issue of concern was the choice of using biodiversity hotspots, and not for example protected areas, for the analysis. The Biodiversity Hotspots are based mainly on plant endemism and probably the taxa most affected by war are mammals and birds. However, the authors defend their choice by referring to the fact that also vertebrate endemism is high in the biodiversity hotspots. Another problem is that the authors couldn’t link consequences for biodiversity to the war, or at least did not aim at any analyses exploring this.

Generally, the paper inspired lively discussions on how warfare might affect biodiversity and we all agreed that the paper draws attention to an important issue.

Link to the paper:

Hanson, T., Brooks, T.M., Da Fonseca, G.A.B., Hoffmann, M., Lamoreux, J.F., Machlis, G., Mittermeier, C.G., Mittermeier, R.A., Pilgrim, J.D. 2009. Warfare in Biodiversity hotspots. Conservation Biology 23: 578-587.

doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01166.x