Issues in Protected Area Design

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Issues in Protected Area Design

• Geography 648
• Spring 04

With reference to Wright 1996
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Topics

• What is ecosystem management?
• Where did it come from?
• What is adaptive management?
• What are ecosystem processes?
• What do we need to focus on?
• How large should a protected area be?
• Connecting protected areas with networks
  corridors
• The effects of fragmentation isolation

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Ecosystem Management

• Adopted as a paradigm for sustainability, first
  in the 1930s
• Defined in many ways by many interests
• Agee Johnson (1988)
• involves regulating internal ecosystem
  structure and function, plus inputs and outputs,
  to achieve socially desirable conditions. It
  includes, within a chosen and not always static
  geographic setting, the usual array of planning
  and management activities but conceptualized in a
  systems framework
• Grumbine (1994)
• Ecosystem management integrates scientific
  knowledge of ecological relationships within a
  complex sociopolitical and values framework
  toward the general goal of protecting native
  ecosystem integrity over the long term.

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• Grumbines (1994) goals of ecosystem management
• Maintain viable populations of all native species
  in situ
• Represent all native ecosystem types across their
  natural range of variation
• Maintain evolutionary and ecological processes
• Manage over periods of time long enough to
  maintain the evolutionary potential of species
  ecosystems
• Accommodate human use occupancy within these
  constraints

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So how do you define a native system?

• Any part of the universe chosen with a line
  around it? (Agee Johnson 1988)
• Ecosystems are spatially temporally variable
• How do we consider different boundary and
  seasonal changes in a continuously varying
  landscape?
• How do we differentiate between natural and
  anthropogenic changes within that landscape?
• it is equally clear that ecosystem management
  boundaries are neither definable nor solvable
  within these boundaries (Wright)

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Successful Ecosystem Management

• results in a mutually acceptable agreement or
  decision reached by affected interests through a
  negotiation process that reconciles and
  integrates the legitimate interests of all
  parties (WA Sea Grant 1989)

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Successful ecosystem management, cont

• How do we get the scientific information Grumbine
  calls for? How do we organize it within a
  spatially/temporally dynamic system?
• Noss (1990) 4 levels of scale, and 3 indicator
  levels is one framework
• Regional landscape
• Community ecosystem
• Population-species
• Genetic

• Composition
• Structure
• Function

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Adaptive management

• all management is a long-term experiment
  (Wright)
• Hopefully with well-defined, explicit hypotheses
  about system structures processes, clear
  statements of goals, and a set of targeted
  actions
• Uncertainty must be recognized and accounted
  forboth from natural and social processes

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Goals of adaptive management

• Should encompass all scales and indicators
• Should have knowledge as much as possible of
  potential disturbance patterns
• Should include all stakeholders

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What are ecosystems, and their processes?

• Some say A population-community relationship
• Some say The flows of energy, nutrients and
  other materials within a system
• Likens (1992) the processes influencing the
  distribution and abundance of organisms, the
  interactions among organisms, and the
  interactions between organisms and the
  transformation and flux or energy and matter
  whew

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Processes in an ecosystem

• Are biotic, abiotic, occurring at all scales
• And the interactions between organisms and
  between organisms and their environment
• Are nonlinear
• Change regularly/cyclically, directionally, or
  chaotically

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3 concepts of ecosystem processes

• Self-organization
• Living systems go through cycles
• resilience
• Disturbance
• An intrusive external event our of tune with
  local frequencies
• Boundaries
• Represent a sudden spatial change in the systems
  organization
• Ecotone when environmental conditions reach a
  threshold for tolerance and the system changes to
  a different organization
• edges

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Considerations when applying these principles to
management

• Zoning creating boundaries
• Natural zones
• Cultural zones
• Development zones
• Beyond park boundaries
• Habitat destruction outside of the park
• Softening boundaries (how does that work?)
• Parks as a component in an overall landscape
• People as part of the system
• A sense of connection
• What degrades the ecosystem degrades the ecosystem

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Sofor an ecosystem management approach(Capra
(1994)

• Shift from focusing on parts to a focus on the
  whole
• The implications of boundaries
• Shift from truth to approximate descriptions
• We cant understand it all..but limited and
  approximate descriptions of reality
• Shift from objective to epistemic science
• what we observe is not nature itself, but nature
  exposed to our method of questioning (Heisenberg
  1971)

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How much is enough?

• Goal to maintain diversity and ecosystem
  functions over time
• Single large or several small? Not that easy!
• Different answers by species, level or
  protection, topography, surroundings, what else?
  Whose values?
• 1982 World Parks Congress in Bali said 10
• 1987 Brundtland Commission said 12

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How much?

• 63,000 protected areas
• WWF goal 10
• Global 11
• Bhutan 21
• Saudi Arabia 38
• Israel 15
• Oman 11
• British Columbia over 12

• US 21
• Thailand 14
• Myanmar 0
• Iraq 0
• Canada 10
• (UNEP surface to area ratio of protected areas
  1997)

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Some solutions

• Iterative map-based testing (Murphy Noon 1992)
• GIS each conservation criteria is represented in
  a map layer
• Areas needed to fulfill each criterion are mapped
  and overlaid, and the final map represents the
  optimal reserve network
• Knowledge of uncertainty and sensitivity of
  mapped criterions
• Ideal protected areas should be defined on the
  basis of physiographic/biogeographic critera, not
  political boundaries

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What should we protect?

• Single species, focal species (representative of
  system processes), rare species? Endemic species?
  Endangered, threatened, not yet endangered?
• Wide ranging animals? Generalist or Specialist
  species?
• Ecosystem health and integrity?
• Buffers?
• Habitat types? Underrepresented or by process?
  Or by species?
• Coarse filter
• Fine filter
• Alpha diversity
• Beta diversity
• Perhaps a combination? How do we decide?
• Is how much really the question? Or is it simply
  reassuring to us humans!

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Networks and Corridors

• Parks protected areas are isolated and
  increasingly contained in a disarticulated,
  dismembered landscape.
• They are necessary but not sufficient to protect
  biological diversity and ecological processes and
  functions
• Wildlife corridors may be used as a method for
  facilitating dispersal, migration and breeding
  between small isolated populations
• For example Florida panthers and black bears

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Connectivity

• Based on the thesis that an interconnected system
  of reserves would be greater in function than the
  sum of its part
• There has been some controversy, how do we know
  these work?
• (Harris and Atkins 1991) will such an
  interconnected system of habitats be superior for
  more natural assemblagesand ecological
  processesthan a disjunct system of isolated
  processes?

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Corridors

• Advantages of Corridors
• increased immigration rate between populations
  which could maintain diversity, increase
  population size, decrease probability of
  extinction, and prevent inbreeding
• increase foraging area for a wide range of
  species
• allow an escape or refuge from predators, fire
  and other disturbances
• Disadvantages of Corridors
• increase immigration could result in the spread
  of disease, pests, foreign species, decrease in
  the level of genetic variation, and outbreeding
  depression
• facilitate spread of fire, and increase exposure
  to predators, hunters and poachers
• cost

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What does fragmentation do?

• Demographic Effects of Habitat Fragmentation
• Some examples of demographic dilemmas encountered
  by small fragmented populations include
  difficulty
• in finding mates,
• skewed sex ratio,
• outbreak of disease,
• food limitations,
• abundance of predators,
• or hostile weather conditions.

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What does fragmentation do?

• Genetic Effects of Habitat Fragmentation
• Many processes decrease the genetic variation in
  a population, especially if the population is
  small and isolated from other populations of the
  same species.
• If there is no migration between populations
  then genetic drift and directional selection for
  advantageous alleles can cause certain alleles to
  become fixed in a population thereby decreasing
  variation.
• Small populations also face decreased
  heterozygosity, increase in inbreeding and
  possibly inbreeding depression.

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What does fragmentation do?

• Management Practices of Small, Isolated
  Populations
• There are many management practices for the
  maintenance of species or populations which are
  threatened because of fragmentation.
• Some of these practices include
• translocation of individuals between populations,
  
• reduction of inbreeding or purging a population
  of genes responsible for decreased fitness,
• preserving or restoring habitat,
• and facilitating dispersal, migration, and
  breeding.

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