Rapid Assessment of Ecosystem Service Co-Benefits of Biodiversity Priority Areas in Madagascar

PLoS One

Marc Steininger¹  Luciano Andriamaro¹  Kellee Koenig²  Miroslav Honzák²  Madeleine McKinnon²  Daniel Juhn²  Carlos Andres Cano²  Will R. Turner²  Rachel A. Neugarten²  David Hole²  Pierre Carret³  Timothy Max Wright⁴  Andriambolantsoa Rasolohery⁵  Hedley S. Grantham⁶ 

[1] Conservation International, Antananarivo, Madagascar;Conservation International, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America;Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America;Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America;Vulcan, Inc. Seattle, Washington, United States of America;Wildlife Conservation Society, Byron Bay, Australia

关键词: Ecosystems;    Forests;    Conservation science;    Fisheries;    Madagascar;    Biodiversity;    Fresh water;    Forest ecology;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.pone.0168575

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

The importance of ecosystems for supporting human well-being is increasingly recognized by both the conservation and development sectors. Our ability to conserve ecosystems that people rely on is often limited by a lack of spatially explicit data on the location and distribution of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits provided by nature to people. Thus there is a need to map ES to guide conservation investments, to ensure these co-benefits are maintained. To target conservation investments most effectively, ES assessments must be rigorous enough to support conservation planning, rapid enough to respond to decision-making timelines, and often must rely on existing data. We developed a framework for rapid spatial assessment of ES that relies on expert and stakeholder consultation, available data, and spatial analyses in order to rapidly identify sites providing multiple benefits. We applied the framework in Madagascar, a country with globally significant biodiversity and a high level of human dependence on ecosystems. Our objective was to identify the ES co-benefits of biodiversity priority areas in order to guide the investment strategy of a global conservation fund. We assessed key provisioning (fisheries, hunting and non-timber forest products, and water for domestic use, agriculture, and hydropower), regulating (climate mitigation, flood risk reduction and coastal protection), and cultural (nature tourism) ES. We also conducted multi-criteria analyses to identify sites providing multiple benefits. While our approach has limitations, including the reliance on proximity-based indicators for several ES, the results were useful for targeting conservation investments by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). Because our approach relies on available data, standardized methods for linking ES provision to ES use, and expert validation, it has the potential to quickly guide conservation planning and investment decisions in other data-poor regions.

【 授权许可】

CC BY