Biodiversity III: protected areas

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Questions

1. What is endemism?2. What is the congruence criterion for

selecting protected areas?3. How is congruence scale

dependent?4. Why do Orme et al. suggest

endemism may be the best criterion for choosing protected areas, at least for birds?

Biodiversity hotspots

“Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities”Myers et al., Nature 24 Feb 2000

Leading hotspots

Tropical AndesThe richest and most diverse region on Earth, the Tropical Andes contains 15-17 percent of the world's plant life in only 0.8 percent of its area. The hotspot spans 1,258,000 square kilometers, from western Venezuela to northern Chile and Argentina, the Tropical Andes hotspot includes large portions of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Roughly bounded by the Tropic of Capricorn in the south and the end of the Andes range in Colombia and Venezuela in the north, the region follows the tropical part of the Andes Mountains and several adjoining cordilleras. The Tropical Andes extend downward to an elevation of 1,000 meters in the west, where it borders the Chocó-Darién-Western Ecuador hotspot. In the east it reaches 500 meters in elevation, a cutoff between the forests of the Andean slopes and the Amazonian lowlands.

MadagascarA series of islands scattered in the western Indian Ocean off the southeast coast of Africa forms the Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands hotspot. Dominated by the nation of Madagascar, the fourth largest island on Earth (slightly larger than France), the hotspot also includes neighboring the island groups of the Mascarenes (Mauritius, Rodrigues, and Reúnion), Comoros, and Seychelles. Madagascar has an astounding 10 plant families, 5 bird families, and 5 primate families that live nowhere else on Earth. This hotspot is one of the most important and threatened conservation priority areas on the planet.

Brazil's Atlantic forest

The region holds an incredible 20,000 plant species, 40 percent of which are found no where else, in an area fifty times smaller than the Brazilian Amazon. Twenty-nine critically endangered vertebrate species are clinging to survival in the region, including three species of lion tamarins and the Alagoas currasow, which is extinct in the wild.

CaribbeanThe Caribbean hotspot encompasses most of the island groups in the Caribbean Sea, including the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Lesser Antilles, and the Greater Antilles (Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola, which includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti). The hotspot also includes the southern tip of the U.S. state of Florida, namely the Everglades wetlands and the Florida Keys. Politically, the Caribbean is composed of 12 independent nations and several French, British, U.S. and Dutch jurisdictions. While the hotspot spans 4.31 million square kilometers of ocean, it covers merely 263,535 square kilometers of land area.

Sundaland and Wallacea

Wallace's Line

Wallace's Line

Congruence

• Spatial overlap of properties with unique contributions to conservation– Examples:

• Richness• Endemism• Extinction risk• Others?

• What is converse of congruent? Complementary?

2005, Nature 436:1016-1019

Richness

Threatened

Endemic

As hotspot area increasesCongruence increases

1. What's the rationale for creating such 'hotspots'?2. Focus is on endemic plants. Why endemics? Why

plants?3. The authors suggest the hotspots are defensible

'biogeographic units'. What is a biogeographic unit, and why should we expect such biotic boundaries?

4. Units must meet 2 criteria to make the hotspot list. What are they, and what determines the thresholds? Where do these data come from?

5. The authors report that the 25 hotspots could protect 44% of all plants on Earth in only 1.4% of the land surface. Is this a significant number? How can you tell?

6. In Table 4, the authors present a species/area ratio that they offer as an additional means to judge hotspot significance. Based on what we know of species-area curves, do you see anything wrong with this? (Hint: 100 km2 is about the size of the city of Syracuse. How many plants would you guess we have in this area?)

7. Table 5 lists congruence estimates for plants and animals in each hotspot. What is congruence, and how do we know that these values are important?

8. The authors argue that species extinctions might continue in these hotspots even if we protect the remaining areas immediately. Why?

1. Why does it matter whether the conservation metrics of species richness, species endemism, or threat are 'congruent'?

2. The authors create maps of breeding bird diversity. Where do these data come from?

3. Species richness is the number of birds per grid cell. How were the values of endemism and threat calculated?

4. How did the authors determine whether these diversity metrics were congruent? What does congruent mean here?

5. Only 2.5% of total grid cells included hotspots for all three metrics. In particular, species richness and endemism were highest in very different places. Why?

6. What is the importance of Fig. 3b?7. The authors conclude that endemism may be

the single most powerful metric for prioritizing areas for biodiversity protection. Given it is not congruent with richness or threat, why is endemism chosen above the others?

Myers et al. 2000Orme et al. 2005