Representation of Global and National Conservation Priorities by Colombia's Protected Area Network
Abstract
Background: How do national-level actions overlap with global priorities for conservation?
Answering this question is especially important in countries with high and unique
biological diversity like Colombia. Global biodiversity schemes provide conservation
guidance at a large scale, while national governments gazette land for protection
based on a combination of criteria at regional or local scales. Information on how
a protected area network represents global and national conservation priorities is
crucial for finding gaps in coverage and for future expansion of the system. Methodology/Principal
Findings: We evaluated the agreement of Colombia's protected area network with global
conservation priorities, and the extent to which the network reflects the country's
biomes, species richness, and common environmental and physical conditions. We used
this information to identify priority biomes for conservation. We find the dominant
strategy in Colombia has been a proactive one, allocating the highest proportion of
protected land on intact, difficult to access and species rich areas like the Amazon.
Threatened and unique areas are disproportionately absent from Colombia's protected
lands. We highlight six biomes in Colombia as conservation priorities that should
be considered in any future expansion of Colombia's protected area network. Two of
these biomes have less than 3% of their area protected and more than 70% of their
area transformed for human use. One has less than 3% protected and high numbers of
threatened vertebrates. Three biomes fall in both categories. Conclusions: Expansion
of Colombia's Protected Area Network should consider the current representativeness
of the network. We indicate six priority biomes that can contribute to improving the
representation of threatened species and biomes in Colombia.
Type
Other articleSubject
biodiversity conservationdeforestation
patterns
ecoregions
landscape
reserves
people
biology
multidisciplinary sciences
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4575Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1371/journal.pone.0013210Citation
Forero-Medina,German;Joppa,Lucas. 2010. Representation of Global and National Conservation
Priorities by Colombia's Protected Area Network. Plos One 5(10): e13210-e13210.
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