Suchergebnisse

Nordic priority case examples -- Summary -- Conclusions and take-home messages -- Theoretical background of restoration prioritization -- Literature -- Preface -- On-going policies for restoration priority in the Nordic countries -- Introduction -- 14 case examples.

Extending conservation area networks is one of the most important measures in the struggle against biodiversity loss. Many areas with high conservation effect locate in privately owned land so establishing new protected areas on private land is often seen necessary. In many countries, protection of private land has traditionally been top-down controlled and landowners have had little or no power to affect conservation decisions. A good example is European Union's Natura 2000 programme that led to conservation conflicts locally. To avoid conflicts and to increase acceptability of new protected areas located in privately owned land, many voluntary and incentive-based conservation measures have been already widely applied. Many scientific papers report of successful protection through voluntary measures and celebrate their ability to make conservation socially more acceptable. However, voluntary measures do not affect only the social aspects of conservation, but also the biodiversity representation, by limiting the different options for protection. We studied the second phase of Finnish Peatland Conservation Programme that was originally planned to be implemented as a statutory programme enabling land expropriations, but was later changed as a programme of voluntary protection. We constructed three structurally different spatial prioritization analyses for three different scenarios: 1. Total acceptance; the analysis removes all the opposed peatlands from the solution despite their biodiversity representation. 2. Partial acceptance; the analysis considers landowners' resistance as a continuous variable seeking a balance between resistance and biodiversity's irreplaceability, while trying to maximize biodiversity representation with connectivity considerations. 3. Forced protection; the analysis maximises biodiversity representation and connectivity without considering landowners' resistance to protection. Preliminary results show that demanding landowners' total acceptance in peatland protection means a solution with significantly lower biodiversity representation for legal protection than the two other solutions. Instead, considering landowners' acceptance partially leads to the solution that enables protection of practically as much biodiversity as forced protection. Our study shows that when high quality substitutive areas do not exist, categorical consideration of landowners' resistance to protection leads to inefficient use of conservation resources. To avoid this, the ecologically most valuable areas should be allowed to be protected in spite of landowners' opinion. Our results also indicate that a great deal of landowners' resistance can be considered without a major decline in biodiversity representation in the solution, if conservation planners integrate landowners' opinions as part of a planning process from the very beginning. ; peerReviewed

The frequently discussed gap between conservation science and practice is manifest in the gap between spatial conservation prioritization plans and their implementation. We analyzed the research-implementation gap of one zoning case by comparing results of a spatial prioritization analysis aimed at avoiding ecological impact of peat mining in a regional zoning process with the final zoning plan. We examined the relatively complex planning process to determine the gaps among research, zoning, and decision making. We quantified the ecological costs of the differing trade-offs between ecological and socioeconomic factors included in the different zoning suggestions by comparing the landscape-level loss of ecological features (species occurrences, habitat area, etc.) between the different solutions for spatial allocation of peat mining. We also discussed with the scientists and planners the reasons for differing zoning suggestions. The implemented plan differed from the scientists suggestion in that its focus was individual ecological features rather than all the ecological features for which there were data; planners and decision makers considered effects of peat mining on areas not included in the prioritization analysis; zoning was not truly seen as a resource-allocation process and not emphasized in general minimizing ecological losses while satisfying economic needs (peat-mining potential); and decision makers based their prioritization of sites on site-level information showing high ecological value and on single legislative factors instead of finding a cost-effective landscape-level solution. We believe that if the zoning and decision-making processes are very complex, then the usefulness of science-based prioritization tools is likely to be reduced. Nevertheless, we found that high-end tools were useful in clearly exposing trade-offs between conservation and resource utilization. ; peerReviewed