I like the question, although it is not a new one. The problem cannot be tackled scientifically but is closely tied to the political and even international arena. The conventional first step is to monitor, assess and evaluate the shifts and then produce possible solutions. Afterwards, as usual, throw it at the administration and hope for the best.

This traditional approach may not be working. But as Ali Al-Dousari advised: Look into solutions that do not rely on fixed areas. this might sound counterintuitive. However, entrenched administrations with invested politicians will not adapt easily. So try to put solutions into place, that reach from the protected areas into their surroundings. I believe in Canada they had the "problem" of wolf reserves, were not a single wolfpack roamed solely in the reservy. Every single one they tracked also roamed outside. Maybe they found a solution.

In Germany, National Parks of the highest protection status are often surounded by so called "protected landscape Areas". In these areas socio-economic tools are used besides coercive instruments, in order to nudge the populace to conserve the landscape or even change it into habitats that support wildlife/ endangered plans while at the same time leave the possibility of agriculture. Keep in mind that these are densely populated areas.

Do we need protected areas? I think the concept (range management) is better. We don't want to protect the areas because we don't want to isolate it from surrounding ecosystems, also, we don't want to put more pressure in the non protected areas. Furthermore, we noted that biodiversity is negatively affected in some protected area.

I like the question, although it is not a new one. The problem cannot be tackled scientifically but is closely tied to the political and even international arena. The conventional first step is to monitor, assess and evaluate the shifts and then produce possible solutions. Afterwards, as usual, throw it at the administration and hope for the best.

This traditional approach may not be working. But as Ali Al-Dousari advised: Look into solutions that do not rely on fixed areas. this might sound counterintuitive. However, entrenched administrations with invested politicians will not adapt easily. So try to put solutions into place, that reach from the protected areas into their surroundings. I believe in Canada they had the "problem" of wolf reserves, were not a single wolfpack roamed solely in the reservy. Every single one they tracked also roamed outside. Maybe they found a solution.

In Germany, National Parks of the highest protection status are often surounded by so called "protected landscape Areas". In these areas socio-economic tools are used besides coercive instruments, in order to nudge the populace to conserve the landscape or even change it into habitats that support wildlife/ endangered plans while at the same time leave the possibility of agriculture. Keep in mind that these are densely populated areas.

There are several factors you have to take into account, when analyzing or predicting changes within protected areas. By the way, protected areas are not an instrument to manage but to conserve biodiversity (natural and native). Managing biodiversity should happen at the landscape level; so when you talk about predictions for climate change, you should be able to design corridors, establish stepping-stones and put in place socio-economic incentives to maintain them. From a legal point of view it will be hard to “move” protected areas, furthermore, the displacement of species or ecosystems, will not be too big – here of course will be important to take into account the area/size of the protected area, the level of intactness (natural ecosystems)  and the rhythm of land-use changes around.

thanks for these first statements.i hope that this discussion goes on... because there are no simple solutions to be seen.

one point that comes clear is the fact that in many cases, surrounding landscacpes / communities / ecosystems are intensely modified and under strong human pressure, particularly in central european landscapes where protected areas such as national parks are representing sort of the last remnants of close-to-natural conditions. there, it is difficult to imagine to establish new protected areas of comparable quality within short time periods, or to install well functioning corridors and networks within this highly fragmented and intensely used landscapes, that would not be capable to develop comparable ecosystems through greening or other forms of management. of course it would be optimal to look at entire landscapes and not on single protected areas, but this is feasible only in landscapes with low human pressures.

that is a very interesting Point -- then we probably will have to acknowledge that there is a no-return Point, that might be the case for Europe. But measuring tresholds or tippint-Points could be also an interesting Topic that I believe have not been addressed (maybe it is not politically correct?)

The question of "how do we assess the performance of protected areas, independently of the species which currently occur within them" has been something I've thought a bit about.  

You suggest an interesting conundrum:  a protected area could have 100% species turnover, in some future condition, yet maintain high conservation function.  This could be because the "new" assemblages contain highly valued species (on basis of rarity, human uses, etc) or if species richness actually increased.  The metrics we use to assess the protected area's efficacy will potentially have a great influence how we rank this sort of change. 

Predicting the composition of future protected area assemblages is a big challenge, particularly for taxa which are poorly studied.  We may build SDMs or niche models to estimate these future distributions, but for poorly studied taxa (e.g. insects or other arthropods) we may have very little confidence in our accounts of how the predictor variables that estimate species distributions drive the ecology of individuals, populations, or communities to generate the macro-scale phenomenon of species ranges.  

I have recently suggested that for managers facing climate change across a protected area network, the climate states inherited by the geographic position of the protected areas themselves may be a good place to start.  Using SDMs to assess the niche space occupied by protected area units can in fact tell us a great deal about the landscape context of the units across the network, neatly sidestepping the logistical and technical problems related to attempts to estimate the bioclimatic envelope or other niche dimensions for any species.

I hope that you may find this relevant.  cheers

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173443

Hi Carl, I like to think about this ......

I think the solution is look for areas that have historically been climate refugia and buffered change or maintained species despite change in the past, in the hope that they will do the same in future.  For example, areas rich in paleoendemics can be assumed to be climatic refugia, but better still, areas rich in paelo and neoendemics not only retain older lineages, but have a recent history of proliferation and speciation, which may be key in ensuring high biodiversity in future, particularly if existing species are forced to extinction.  Thinking about it in this way, perhaps even targeting areas rich in neo-endemics with the idea that they have the highest genetic potential for proliferation, adaptation and expansion.  In summary, I think that evaluating areas where species from broad phylogenetic origins are both conserved and proliferating should be informing new protected areas.  I believe that in the face of dramatic change this will be much more effective that working at the species level.  

I hope there are some useful ideas here.  I often think that our most pressing concern is preserving enough areas to give species a chance to adapt, migrate and evolve. There is also of course the idea that we need many protected areas, with a considerable degree of connectivity to ensure that surviving species that migrate, or even new taxa that evolve with the changing climate, have somewhere to go, and somewhere to grow!

Because of the politics and legal aspects of protected areas, they can never evolve in tandem with the environment, and we have to accept this. If, instead of a strict focus on species or even habitats, we ensure ecological processes are fully functional, then everything else (habitats and species) should fall into place. Climate change, and in particular Relative Sea Level Rise, has implications that make the 'no net loss' objective impossible to achieve across all habitats. See

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2016.07.014

The protection and conservation ideas are good. Most of all the ideas however depend on the Political economy of each country. Obama came into Power and made protection a priority. His successor may overturn all of that with the swoop of his Pen. This is because scientists have not been able to convert the importance of these places into dollars and pounds so that the Political and Legal estate can include this as part of their value addition when they govern and legistlate.  I think the economics of Protected  and conservation areas should become the norm so that using the TEEB principles scientists can demonstrate the value of the functionality of a protected or conserved landscape irrespective of  species immigration or emigration. If the economic value of the protected area becomes part of the legal and political conversation it becomes possible to bring everyone on board as the issue of climate change and other anthropogenic drivers increase their onslaught on these areas.

Dear all,

Sadly, I have to agree with John's arguments. His is the contemporary, practical dominant approach and we had better realise it.

But let us just make a consideration.

If protected areas should "save" themselves by acquiring a substantial economic value, beyond their cultural one, then we should probably eliminate (for example) poetry and prose from our activities, together with all that does not have an immediate economic value.

This myopic approach may have two snags, at least:: (1) eventually, it will decrease or even destroy the wilderness,  beauty and ecological balance of well preserved areas; (2) it will lead to the slow elimination of our cultural heritage. 

All our behaviour can be traced back to its evolutionary roots in other animal species, language abilities included: perhaps the only feature - or one of the very few - which makes us "unique" is our capability of enjoying art, literature and beauty, giving primarily "cultural value" to them. 

If we eliminate this human feature, we'll be closer to the other animals - which may be fine. Just let's be aware of it.

SANDRO

A further question building on the above would also be - what  if there is just isn't any more space to preserve "enough areas to give species a chance to adapt, migrate and evolve", as  Sula eloquently worded it? As was also acknowledged, protected areas cannot move, and if climate change will cause local extinction in a fragmented space (like in a densely populated area), is there much we can do? Are there innovations in cities (as an example) to improve connectivity between PAs and open areas despite a fragmented, developed landscape? An example could be green roofs, but that facilitates only a certain aspect of biodiversity. Any other thoughts on this?

Species sustainability, species niche change in numbers and especially fertile individuals has a bearing on the factors you allude to BUT most importantly conservationists must know that range management and free entry and exit in a habitat, ecosystem, zonations astride and across altitudinal elevation are synonymous with freedom choice to pollinators, aspect like east facing and west facing slopes just to mention on plant biodiversity and also their pollinators as increase in ecosystem temperature increases activity pattern of small bodied pollinators e.g. stingless bees.

For the animal kingdom endemicity particularly large bodied organisms suffer range limitation if food resources dwindle and this reduces fertility levels, take a case for Mountain gorillas Gorilla gorilla berengei, elephants and buffaloes who feeding range has been interrupted by anthropogenic activities cutting of migration routes and related services like hot weather break positions, wet weather movements points etc.

The protected area system in Uganda is a case to study all these scenarios as population pressure has made many national parks and game parks and forests islands in a sea of human populations thus conflict between conservation and human settlement land use patterns. Studies continue to expand at the expense of trade offs between conservation and human needs in terms of consumptive use of natural resources thus a political twist in management e.g. oil resources in the Albertine Rift graben versus the many biodiversity rich centres even where some are world heritage sites!!!

A lot of excellent answers already here. I would concur with the approach advocated by several others, and which has become a major priority of conservation agencies, of incentivizing and encouraging biodiversity-friendly land management practices outside of protected areas.

However, there is another issue which I think is too often neglected: the vast majority of protected area managers have no idea what they're protecting. Very few protected areas even have reasonably comprehensive species lists beyond a few charismatic taxa, and small conservation areas might only have limited species lists of, for example, birds, provided by the public.

I've also seen numerous protected areas that don't even have a decent vegetation map (working in Southern Africa).

The situation has improved in the last couple of decades since a report revealed the poor state of knowledge across South African conservation areas, but in many cases conservation managers are working with outdated data or national-scale maps which are not appropriate at PA scale. One of the most frequent questions I get is "how often should I burn?" for example. So the managers are struggling to come up with clearly-defined, evidence-based policies for their current situation, let alone trying to make long-term plans for the future.

My point being, it's not of much value to have yet more workshops and effort expended on strategies for coping with climate change or other major shifts, when in many cases data, monitoring and even basic land management plans for the current status are weak or non-existent. Get on top of sound management and decision-support systems first to deal with immediate challenges, and then we will know what we need to be concerned about for future challenges.

Dear All,

This is indeed an interesting question without straight forward solutions. In high diversity areas, little may be known of the biology of all the species existing in an area. When wanting to conserve an assemblage of species under changing environmental conditions it is essential that a landscape approach that considers the processes that create and maintain diversity, is adopted. By doing this species will be able to respond to changing climates in their own way, especially if linkages exist in the landscape between protected areas. The key challenge in this approach however is the implementation of the linkages which will be strongly influenced by social, political and economic factors. Perhaps this can be facilitated in countries who are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) if they are aiming on implementing the Aichi targets.  Failing this, then conservation efforts will have to ultimately resort to ex-situ conservation and translocations. As already highlighted by several authors the management of the matrix between protected areas is critical to the survival of many species.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00267-017-0829-0

Thanks for all these very helpful and stimulating thoughts that illustrate the importance of the spatial matrix and or the political situation exposed to a protected area. It makes clear that we cannot look at them as isolated entities and not even as pathwork of entities but rather as areas that are a moving target anyhow in a diverse matrix.

your comments also show the different perspectives not only from practitioners and researchers but also from different continents and biomes, where the degree of isolation of protected areas obviously differs a lot, with consequences on the need to manage for maintaining target species or not.

also the networks of habitats in the vicinity differ with almost no connectivity in some cases (such as industrial nations with dense human population, industries and agriculture) and a haphazard delimitation of a protected area within a matrix of ecosystems of equal quality.

i hope that this discussion goes on, because we need to find approaches that can be implemented on a broad basis of perspectives.

carl

My dearest Ali Al-Dousari - I will direct my comment to you. 

Since you are from Kuwait you can understand how important protected areas are, as a concept, a developing philosophy and for biodiversity conservation and education practice (...especially within an difficult-to-manage, multi-use industrial landscape such as Kuwait - you know). Kuwait is a very small city state, however it has protected some areas somewhat successfully due to protected-area zonation (and struggles). I am not saying that the concept has saved nature in Kuwait, I am saying that without this designation we would have just a mixed-up land-use "range-management" approach in disfunctional multiple-use zonations. Protected areas are heritage conservation areas and they evolve. Within them we can prioritize and manage, even manage best-practice for climate adaptation issues (with biodiveristy taking priority - in some cases at least). So I advocate for protected areas (even at a time of great climate variability and change).  See our work on birds in Kuwait: http://www.kuwaitbirds.org/  

http://www.kuwaitbirds.org/

 Dearest Carl Beierkuhnlein,

Excellent question and great development.

My opinion in short: Protected areas are here to stay and are important; we support them for millions of reasons. In some situations, protected areas are "labs" for introducing conservation /restoration/ adaptive management frameworks. Outside of the "west" this kind of development takes place only in PAs (with mixed successes). Protected areas will keep increasing in variety of forms and the extent they cover; in Greece the Natura 2000 system has 27% of our territory, and there are more sites proposals in the pipeline. And finally there is a cultural aspect: if we want to track and organize for climate adaptation we need to explore methods, research& development and experiment in organized areas - PA will help for this. Lastly, the cultural component is interesting and perplexing (i.e. protecting cultural landscapes in protected areas). Please read:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315792171_Cultural_landscapes_and_attributes_of_culturalness_in_protected_areas_An_exploratory_assessment_in_Greece

Many thanks 

Stam

Article Cultural landscapes and attributes of “culturalness” in prot...

Normally, traditional model of protected areas (very isolated areas with rudimentary management and centralized decision-making that is de facto the responsibility of governments concerned) is obsolete.

Currently, in protected areas, protection is combined with certain uses. This protection employs innovative and multidisciplinary conservation tools and involves local people (participatory approach), governments and even some international organizations such as UNEP.