Biodiversity is dwindling at a rapid pace across the globe. As one key remedy, we are protecting areas around the world, hoping that they will suffice to save what is left. While protected areas have undoubtedly contributed to slowing the overall biodiversity loss, it is unclear how well they work across multiple species concurrently. To explore this, researchers at the University of Helsinki examined changes in the occurrence of hundreds of species within and outside of protected areas.
"Our results show that only a small proportion of species explicitly benefit from protection, but this varied by group. Birds show the highest positive response to protection, one out of five species, and plants show warm-dwelling species benefiting more. Protected areas mostly help by slowing down the decline of species occurrences," says associate professor Marjo Saastamoinen, senior author of the study.
"Importantly though, larger protected areas and longer protection times enhanced positive effects. The benefits were boosted for many more species, adding evidence for the genuine effects of protection."To evaluate how effective protected areas are, the ideal approach is to compare how species are doing withinto how they are doing in similar yet unprotected areas. While this approach may sound self-evident, it is rarely applied.
Now researchers from the Research Center for Ecological Change at the University of Helsinki implemented this approach to hundreds of species across four decades. They found mixed results, with many species having similar trends within protected and unprotected sites. Importantly, species decline is far from being halted by protecting an area. Rather, the rate of species decline is slowed down with protection—but rarely stopped or reversed into positive trends.
, mammals, plants and lake phytoplankton between protected and unprotected sites across four decades.
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