Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness
Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negati...
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Published in | Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences Vol. 370; no. 1681; p. 20140281 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
England
The Royal Society
05.11.2015
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to help measure the conservation impact of PA management interventions is high. Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence for a link between PAME assessment results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PA management interventions on conservation outcomes. We conclude that PAME data, while designed as a tool for local adaptive management, may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized and mitigated where possible. |
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Bibliography: | Theme issue ‘Measuring the difference made by protected areas: methods, applications and implications for policy and practice’ compiled and edited by Robert L. Pressey and Paul J. Ferraro ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-3 content type line 23 ObjectType-Review-1 ObjectType-Article-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 One contribution of 16 to a theme issue ‘Measuring the difference made by protected areas: methods, applications and implications for policy and practice’. |
ISSN: | 0962-8436 1471-2970 |
DOI: | 10.1098/rstb.2014.0281 |