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  Designing protected areas to conserve natural resources »

  Biologists view Protected Areas (PAs) as natural areas established and managed primarily for the conservation of nature. However, many early Pas were established for aesthetic or socio-economic reasons and received little scientific input to their design. More recently, scientists have identified gaps in PA networks and various contemporary PAs have been established to provide for habitats and species in need of protection.
  Scientists have also modelled minimum areas and population sizes that should be protected to prevent extinctions arising from demographic or chance causes. However, these theoretical ideals are difficult to put into practice, particularly as PAs increasingly face more immediate external threats. If scientists are to influence future PA design, and if PAs are to succeed in the long term, these concepts must be applied in practice. Therefore, sufficient protection must be integrated with human needs and aspirations in the design of future protected areas.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Parks or arks: where to conserve threatened mammals? »

  Growing deterministic and stochastic threats to many wild populations of large vertebrates have focused attention on the conservation significance of captive breeding and subsequent reintroduction. However, work on both gorillas and black rhinos questions this shift in emphasis. In these species, field-based conservation can be effective if properly supported and, although this is not cheap, per capita costs may still be considerably lower than for ex situ propagation in captivity. Here we attempt to broaden the scope of this debate by contrasting the breeding success and costs of in situ and captive programmes for a range of threatened mammals.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Progress towards international targets for protected area coverage in mountains »

  Through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the world’s governments recently adopted a target to protect at least 17% of the global land area by 2020. This paper evaluates current levels of protection for mountains at multiple scales. It shows that the CBD’s 17% target has already been almost met at a global scale: 16.9% of the world’s mountain areas outside Antarctica fall within protected areas. However, protection of mountain areas at finer scales remains uneven and is largely insufficient, with 63% (125) of countries, 57% (4) of realms, 67% (8) of biomes, 61% (437) of ecoregions and 53% (100) of Global 200 priority ecoregions falling short of the target. The CBD target also calls for protected areas to be focussed “especially [at] areas of particular importance for biodiversity”. Important Bird Areas and Alliance for Zero Extinction sites represent existing global networks of such sites. It is therefore of major concern that 39% and 45% respectively of these sites in mountain areas remain entirely unprotected. Achievement of the CBD target in mountain regions will require more focused expansion of the protected area network in addition to enhanced management of individual sites and the wider countryside in order to ensure long term conservation of montane biodiversity and the other ecosystem services it provides.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Progressive impact of piecemeal infrastructure development on wild reindeer »

  Our results show that any further infrastructure development will put the remaining European population of wild mountain reindeer at great risk, as further habitat fragmentation will make the remaining undisturbed patches too small for holding viable populations. We discuss the importance of controlling piecemeal development in infrastructure for conservation of wildlife and argue that minimizing infrastructure development is likely one of the largest challenges in wildlife conservation ahead.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Distribution, status, and proposals for the conservation of mountain gazelle Gazella gazella cora in south-west Saudi Arabia »

  Nineteen different areas in south-west Saudi Arabia from which mountain gazelle Gazella gazella cora were reported between 1988 and 1992 were visited during a field survey conducted between August 1992 and February 1993. Evidence of the continued presence of gazelle was found at 11 of these locations. All populations were small: estimated population sizes ranged from 5 to 50. In the remaining eight areas it appeared that gazelle had become locally extinct since the last report. Thus gazelle populations appear to be becoming extinct at an alarming rate (eight out of 19, or 42, in five years). The major cause of extinctions and threat to existing populations is illegal hunting. Traditional conservation measures will take time to implement, and may be too late to save most gazelle populations. Instead, protection enforced by a system of auxiliary rangers, recruited from among the local population and working in cooperation with the forces of the local civilian administration, is recommended.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Threat from deforestation to montane and lowland birds and mammals in insular South-east Asia »

  A reduction in forest area should result in a reduction of its number of species and, moreover, do so in a characteristic way according to the familiar species-area relationship. Brooks, Pimm & Collar (1997) applied this formula to the losses in forest area in the Philippines and Indonesia. Independently derived totals of the number of endemic bird species that are threatened with extinction broadly agree with these predicted losses. In some cases, however, predicted losses overestimate or underestimate the actual numbers of threatened species.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Book review: Data Mining for Global Trends in Mountain Biodiversity »

  With a view to the future, the book points the reader to the Mountain Biodiversity Portal (http://www.mountainbiodiversity.org) that has just been launched by the GMBA and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This tool has the potential to greatly facilitate access to mountain biodiversity data because it allows users to find GBIF data for specific elevational and thermal belts within their region of interest. A very similar tool already allows users of the World Database on Protected Areas (http://www.wdpa.org) to find GBIF data for a protected area of interest. Thanks to these collaborative efforts, researchers will increasingly get the data they require without the need to carry out time-consuming overlays of species and other data sets for their region of interest. The GMBA/GBIF Mountain Biodiversity Portal is a fine example for the technical possibilities of our time and will certainly help to further stimulate the creative use of georeferenced biodiversity data promoted by this book.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  La délimitation des montagnes européennes (Delineating Europe's mountains) »

  As the importance of mountain spaces is more widely recogised, it seems necessary to establish a coherent definition of these spaces. The UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) proposed the first global delineation in 2000. However, certain European countries have used national definitions of mountain spaces since the 1950s. Within the framework of social and economic integration policies at the heart of the European Union, an agreed delineation of European mountain spaces has been established, based on the definition proposed by UNEP-WCMC. The process of adaptation of the global definition to the European context is described, as well as the results for 29 European countries.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Progress towards the Convention on Biological Diversity terrestrial 2010 and marine 2012 targets for protected area coverage »

  In the past few years, a number of analyses have been undertaken to measure progress towards the 2010 and 2012 CBD targets. This report demonstrates how the measurement of progress is influenced by decisions on which protected areas are included (for instance, whether internationally designated sites, or sites without an assigned IUCN category are included) and which biogeographic datasets used (for instance which mountain dataset is chosen), and highlights the need for standardised methods and datasets.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers
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  Reply to Jenkins and Joppa – Expansion of the global terrestrial protected area system »

  Two recent analyses have measured protected area coverage for each of the world’s realms, biomes and ecoregions - UNEP-WCMC, 2008 and Jenkins and Joppa, 2009 Expansion of the global terrestrial protected area system, Biological Conservation 142 (2009), pp. 2166–2174, using the WWF Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World.
  However, data handling procedures differ between these analyses, resulting in differences in the protection statistics reported. Here we outline differences in the use of datasets, present alternative analyses of the protected area coverage of WWF realms, biomes and ecoregions for 2009, and compare the two estimates of protected area coverage.

  Resource Type: Journal Papers