Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
mechanism addressing biodiversity conservation, is currently exploring a
resource allocation framework that builds on existing templates. Both civil
society and government organizations often utilize the recognition given
to regions as global conservation priorities as justii cation when applying
for geographically l exible funding. In addition, the global prioritization
systems must have had sizeable ef ects in the cancellation, relocation or
mitigation of environmentally harmful activities, even in the absence of
specii c legislation (Kunich, 2001). Unfortunately, resources still fall an
order of magnitude short of required conservation funding (James et al.,
1999). Nevertheless, the dollar amounts are impressive, and represent
dramatic increases in conservation investment in these regions.
Challenges facing global prioritization
Limitations of data have thus far generally restricted global conservation
prioritization to specialist estimates of irreplaceability, to habitat loss as a
measure of vulnerability, and to coarse geographic units dei ned a priori.
Over the last i ve years, spatial datasets have been compiled with the
potential to reduce these constraints (Baillie et al., 2004), particularly for
mammals (Ceballos et al., 2005), birds (Orme et al., 2005), and amphibians
(Stuart et al., 2004). When these maps are combined with assessment of
conservation status, they enable the development of threat metrics based
on threatened species directly (Sisk et al., 1994; Rodrigues et al., 2004a). So
far, the main advances to global prioritization enabled by these new data
are validation tests of existing templates (Fonseca et al., 2000; Burgess et
al., 2002). Encouragingly, global gap analysis of priorities for the repre-
sentation of terrestrial vertebrate species in protected areas (Rodrigues et
al., 2004a, b) and initial regional assessment of plants (Küper et al., 2004)
yield results similar to existing approaches (Figure 2.5).
A few have argued that global conservation priorities should be driven
solely by those vertebrates known and loved by society
(Jepson and
Canney, 2001). However, invertebrates represent the bulk of eukaryotic
diversity on Earth with over a million known species (Baillie et al., 2004)
and many more yet to be described (Novotny et al., 2002). The conser-
vation status of only ~3500 arthropods has been assessed (Baillie et al.,
2004), and so even setting aside microbes as near-irrelevant to conserva-
tion (Nee, 2004), global conservation priority is still far from being able to
incorporate megadiverse invertebrate taxa (Mace et al., 2000; Brummitt
and Lughadha, 2003). While regional data can show little overlap between
priority areas for arthropods and those for plant and terrestrial vertebrate
taxa (Dobson et al., 1997), there are strong correlations between phytopha-
gous insects and plant species richness
(Kelly and Southwood, 1999), and
preliminary global data for groups like tiger beetles and termites suggest
