Local Scale Comparisons of Biodiversity as a Test for Global Protected Area Ecological Performance: A Meta-Analysis

Posted in Library, News & Publications on 11/7/14

Originally published via PLOS ONE | August 2014 | Volume 9 | Issue 8 
Bernard W. T. Coetzee 1,2*, Kevin J. Gaston 3, Steven L. Chown 2
1 Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa, 2 School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3 Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, United Kingdom

Coetzee etal-PAs Protect Biodiversity_map

Figure 1. Map of the study sites by the centroid coordinates of protected areas for inside-outside pairwise comparisons (black dots; n = 71) and inside only comparisons (red dots; n = 32). Both categories include data where studies reported across clusters of protected areas.

Abstract
Terrestrial protected areas (PAs) are cornerstones of global biodiversity conservation. Their efficacy in terms of maintaining biodiversity is, however, much debated. Studies to date have been unable to provide a general answer as to PA conservation efficacy because of their typically restricted geographic and/or taxonomic focus, or qualitative approaches focusing on proxies for biodiversity, such as deforestation. Given the rarity of historical data to enable comparisons of biodiversity before/after PA establishment, many smaller scale studies over the past 30 years have directly compared biodiversity inside PAs to that of surrounding areas, which provides one measure of PA ecological performance. Here we use a meta-analysis of such studies (N = 86) to test if PAs contain higher biodiversity values than surrounding areas, and so assess their contribution to determining PA efficacy. We find that PAs generally have higher abundances of individual  species, higher assemblage abundances, and higher species richness values compared with alternative land uses. Local scale studies in combination thus show that PAs retain more biodiversity than alternative land use areas.
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