Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness

TY - JOUR

T1 - Measuring impact of protected area management interventions

T2 - current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness

AU - Coad, Lauren

AU - Leverington, Fiona

AU - Knights, Kathryn

AU - Geldmann, Jonas

AU - Eassom, April

AU - Kapos, Valerie

AU - Kingston, Naomi

AU - de Lima, Marcelo

AU - Zamora, Camilo

AU - Cuardros, Ivon

AU - Nolte, Christoph

AU - Burgess, Neil David

AU - Hockings, Marc

PY - 2015/10/12

Y1 - 2015/10/12

N2 - Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world’s land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to helpmeasure the conservation impact of PAmanagement interventions is high. Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence for a link between PAMEassessment results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PAmanagement interventions on conservation outcomes.We conclude that PAME data,while designed as a tool for local adaptivemanagement, may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized and mitigated where possible.

AB - Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world’s land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to helpmeasure the conservation impact of PAmanagement interventions is high. Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence for a link between PAMEassessment results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PAmanagement interventions on conservation outcomes.We conclude that PAME data,while designed as a tool for local adaptivemanagement, may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized and mitigated where possible.

U2 - 10.1098/rstb.2014.0281

DO - 10.1098/rstb.2014.0281

M3 - Review

C2 - 26460133

SN - 0962-8436

VL - 370

JO - Royal Society of London. Philosophical Transactions B. Biological Sciences

JF - Royal Society of London. Philosophical Transactions B. Biological Sciences

IS - 1681

M1 - 20140281

ER -