Quantifying species protection level: A new indicator for the National Biodiversity Assessment

Abstract

Monitoring the level of species protection at the national level can help countries identify both the best places for protected area expansion to take place, as well as identify areas where current management of existing protected areas is not supporting the conservation of species. Here we propose a new practical method, developed for South Africa’s National Biodiversity Assessment, for tracking progress towards a habitat conservation target for species. This provides an indicator at the country level for the effectiveness of a country’s protected area network for the conservation of different taxonomic groups. This indicator can be disaggregated down to each protected area unit to determine effectiveness of current management interventions for species occurring within a protected area. The protection level indicator we have prepared has two components. The first component measures how well represented a species is within a country’s protected area network. This component alone can guide parties as to which species require further protection, where distribution data for species not represented or poorly represented within protected area networks can guide decision makers as to where protected area expansion is needed. The second component includes a measure of management effectiveness within each protected area and when combined with protected area representation provides an overall effective protection level measure for each species. Results for applying this new method to mammals, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies and birds will be presented.