Global priorities for national carnivore conservation under land use change

Abstract

Mammalian carnivores have suffered the biggest range contraction among all biodiversity and are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss and fragmentation. Therefore, we identified priority areas for the conservation of mammalian carnivores, while accounting for species-specific requirements for connectivity and expected agricultural and urban expansion. While prioritizing for carnivores only, we were also able to test their effectiveness as surrogates for 23,110 species of amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles and 867 terrestrial ecoregions. We then assessed the risks to carnivore conservation within each country that makes a contribution to global carnivore conservation. We found that land use change will potentially lead to important range losses, particularly amongst already threatened carnivore species. In addition, the 17% of land targeted for protection under the Aichi Target 11 was found to be inadequate to conserve carnivores under expected land use change. Our results also highlight that land use change will decrease the effectiveness of carnivores to protect other threatened species, especially threatened amphibians. In addition, the risk of human-carnivore conflict is potentially high in countries where we identified spatial priorities for their conservation. As meeting the global biodiversity target will be inadequate for carnivore protection, innovative interventions are needed to conserve carnivores outside protected areas to compliment any proposed expansion of the protected area network.

Figure 1

Global priority maps for the expansion of the protected area network for mammalian carnivores, by accounting for (a) present and (b) future (2040) land use change. Areas in dark red are priorities for protected area expansion. PAs = protected areas. Figure created in ArcGIS 10.2.1 software (URL http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/).

Figure 2. Performance curves quantifying the median proportion of the original occurrences of all carnivore species, represented at each fraction of the terrestrial land protected for carnivores.

The dashed vertical line in yellow represents the percentage currently protected (~11% of terrestrial land). The vertical dashed line in black represents the 17% target for the optimized expansion of the protected area network. The dashed vertical lines in red and blue represent the terrestrial land targets required to meet a 50% representation across all carnivore species under present, and future (2040), land use allocation (21 and 24% of terrestrial land, respectively). The grey dashed lines and rectangle show the corresponding representation levels for already existing protected areas and the Aichi target 11 for 17% terrestrial land protection.

Figure 3. Global risk of human-carnivore conflict.

The bars represent the contribution in terms of total area size (km²) that each country makes to the 17% protection target for mammalian carnivores under present (a) and future (2040) land use change. No priority means that the country makes no contribution to the 17% protection target. Full details about how the risk index was calculated are available from the Methods section. Figure created in ArcGIS 10.2.1 software (URL http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/).