Oscar Venter

A global strategy for road building

The number and extent of roads will expand dramatically this century. Globally, at least 25 million kilometres of new roads are anticipated by 2050; a 60% increase in the total length of roads over that in 2010. Nine-tenths of all road construction is expected to occur in developing nations, including many regions that sustain exceptional biodiversity and vital ecosystem services. Roads penetrating into wilderness or frontier areas are a major proximate driver of habitat loss and fragmentation, wildfires, overhunting and other environmental degradation, often with irreversible impacts on ecosystems. Unfortunately, much road proliferation is chaotic or poorly planned, and the rate of expansion is so great that it often overwhelms the capacity of environmental planners and managers. Here we present a global scheme for prioritizing road building. This large-scale zoning plan seeks to limit the environmental costs of road expansion while maximizing its benefits for human development, by helping to increase agricultural production, which is an urgent priority given that global food demand could double by mid-century. Our analysis identifies areas with high environmental values where future road building should be avoided if possible, areas where strategic road improvements could promote agricultural development with relatively modest environmental costs, and ‘conflict areas’ where road building could have sizeable benefits for agriculture but with serious environmental damage. Our plan provides a template for proactively zoning and prioritizing roads during the most explosive era of road expansion in human history.

Harnessing carbon payments to protect biodiversity.

A model shows that REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) can be extended to biodiversity conservation. Initiatives to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) are providing increasing incentives for forest protection. The collateral benefits for biodiversity depend on the extent to which emissions reductions and biodiversity conservation can be achieved in the same places. Globally, we demonstrate spatial trade-offs in allocating funds to protect forests for carbon and biodiversity and show that cost-effective spending for REDD would protect relatively few species of forest vertebrates. Because trade-offs are nonlinear, we discover that minor adjustments to the allocation of funds could double the biodiversity protected by REDD, while reducing carbon outcomes by only 4 to 8%.

Targeting global protected area expansion for imperiled biodiversity.

Meeting international targets for expanding protected areas could simultaneously contribute to species conservation, but only if the distribution of threatened species informs the future establishment of protected areas.

Threats to Endangered Species in Canada

ABSTRACT We quantified the threats facing 488 species in Canada, categorized by COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) as extinct, extirpated, endangered, threatened, or of special concern. Habitat loss is the most prevalent threat (84%), followed by overexploitation (32%), native species interactions (31%), natural causes (27%), pollution (26%), and introduced species (22%). Agriculture (46%) and urbanization (44%) are the most common human activities causing habitat loss and pollution. For extant species, the number of threats per species increases with the level of endangerment. The prevalence of threat types varies among major habitats, with overexploitation being particularly important, and introduced species particularly unimportant, for marine species. Introduced species are a much less important threat in Canada than in the United States, but the causes of endangerment are broadly similar for Canadian and globally endangered species.

Major conservation policy issues for biodiversity in oceania

Oceania is a diverse region encompassing Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, New Zealand, and Polynesia, and it contains six of the worlds 39 hotspots of diversity. It has a poor record for extinctions, particularly for birds on islands and mammals. Major causes include habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, and overexploitation. We identified six major threatening processes (habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, climate change, overexploitation, pollution, and disease) based on a comprehensive review of the literature and for each developed a set of conservation policies. Many policies reflect the urgent need to deal with the effects of burgeoning human populations (expected to increase significantly in the region) on biodiversity. There is considerable difference in resources for conservation, including people and available scientific information, which are heavily biased toward more developed countries in Oceania. Most scientific publications analyzed for four threats (habitat loss, invasive species, overexploitation, and pollution) are from developed countries: 88.6% of Web of Science publications were from Australia (53.7%), New Zealand (24.3%), and Hawaiian Islands (10.5%). Many island states have limited resources or expertise. Even countries that do (e.g., Australia, New Zealand) have ongoing and emerging significant challenges, particularly with the interactive effects of climate change. Oceania will require the implementation of effective policies for conservation if the regions poor record on extinctions is not to continue.

Sixteen years of change in the global terrestrial human footprint and implications for biodiversity conservation

Human pressures on the environment are changing spatially and temporally, with profound implications for the planets biodiversity and human economies. Here we use recently available data on infrastructure, land cover and human access into natural areas to construct a globally standardized measure of the cumulative human footprint on the terrestrial environment at 1 km2 resolution from 1993 to 2009. We note that while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planets land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity. Encouragingly, we discover decreases in environmental pressures in the wealthiest countries and those with strong control of corruption. Clearly the human footprint on Earth is changing, yet there are still opportunities for conservation gains.

Conserving biodiversity in production landscapes

Alternative land uses make different contributions to the conservation of biodiversity and have different implementation and management costs. Conservation planning analyses to date have generally assumed that land is either protected or unprotected, and that the unprotected portion does not contribute to conservation goals. We develop and apply a new planning approach that explicitly accounts for the contribution of a diverse range of land uses to achieving conservation goals. Using East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case study, we prioritize investments in alternative conservation strategies and account for the relative contribution of land uses ranging from production forest to well-managed protected areas. We employ data on the distribution of mammals and assign species-specific conservation targets to achieve equitable protection by accounting for life history characteristics and home range sizes. The relative sensitivity of each species to forest degradation determines the contribution of each land use to achieving targets. We compare the cost effectiveness of our approach to a plan that considers only the contribution of protected areas to biodiversity conservation, and to a plan that assumes that the cost of conservation is represented by only the opportunity costs of conservation to the timber industry. Our preliminary results will require further development and substantial stakeholder engagement prior to implementation; nonetheless we reveal that, by accounting for the contribution of unprotected land, we can obtain more refined estimates of the costs of conservation. Using traditional planning approaches would overestimate the cost of achieving the conservation targets by an order of magnitude. Our approach reveals not only where to invest, but which strategies to invest in, in order to effectively and efficiently conserve biodiversity.

Do in-stream restoration structures enhance salmonid abundance? A meta-analysis

Despite the widespread use of stream restoration structures to improve fish habitat, few quantitative studies have evaluated their effectiveness. This study uses a meta-analysis approach to test the effectiveness of five types of in- stream restoration structures (weirs, deflectors, cover structures, boulder placement, and large woody debris) on both sal- monid abundance and physical habitat characteristics. Compilation of data from 211 stream restoration projects showed a significant increase in pool area, average depth, large woody debris, and percent cover, as well as a decrease in riffle area, following the installation of in-stream structures. There was also a significant increase in salmonid density (mean effect size of 0.51, or 167%) and biomass (mean effect size of 0.48, or 162%) following the installation of structures. Large dif- ferences were observed between species, with rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) showing the largest increases in den- sity and biomass. This compilation highlights the potential of in-stream structures to create better habitat for and increase the abundance of salmonids, but the scarcity of long-term monitoring of the effectiveness of in-stream structures is prob- lematic.

Biodiversity and REDD at Copenhagen

Reducing carbon emissions through slowing deforestation can benefit biodiversity best if countries implement sensible policies.

The Spatial Distribution of Threats to Species in Australia

Conservation is ultimately about safeguarding biodiversity by arresting and reversing the impacts of threatening processes. Although data on the distributions of species are increasingly well resolved, the spatial distributions of threats to species are poorly understood. We mapped the distributions of eight major threats to Australias threatened plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates using the geographic ranges of species affected by particular threats as surrogates for their spatial occurrence. Our results indicate that simply quantifying the proportion of species affected by particular threatening processes does not adequately capture the variation in the spatial extent, prevalence, or predominance of threats to species. Conservation planning is an inherently spatial process; therefore, explicitly considering the spatial dimension of threats could significantly enhance our ability to direct efforts to areas where the greatest conservation outcomes can be delivered.