Can a l arge‐landscape conservation vision contribute to achieving biodiversity targets?

Evaluating ecosystem protection and fragmentation of the world's major mountain regions

Conserving mountains is important for protecting biodiversity because they have high beta diversity and endemicity, facilitate species movement, and provide numerous ecosystem benefits for people. Mountains are often thought to have lower levels of human modification and contain more protected area than surrounding lowlands. To examine this, we compared biogeographic attributes of the largest, contiguous, mountainous region on each continent. In each region, we generated detailed ecosystems based on Köppen-Geiger climate regions, ecoregions, and detailed landforms. We quantified anthropogenic fragmentation of these ecosystems based on human modification classes of large wild areas, shared lands, and cities and farms. Human modification for half the mountainous regions approached the global average, and fragmentation reduced the ecological integrity of mountain ecosystems up to 40%. Only one-third of the major mountainous regions currently meet the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework target of 30% coverage for all protected areas; furthermore, the vast majority of ecosystem types present in mountains were underrepresented in protected areas. By measuring ecological integrity and human-caused fragmentation with a detailed representation of mountain ecosystems, our approach facilitates tracking progress toward achieving conservation goals and better informs mountain conservation.

Buffalo on the Edge: Factors Affecting Historical Distribution and Restoration of Bison bison in the Western Cordillera, North America

The historic western edge of the bison (Bison bison) range and the ecological processes that caused its formation are frequently debated with important implications for bison restoration across North America. We test the hypothesis that a combination of bottom-up habitat suitability and top-down harvest pressure from Indigenous peoples were important processes in forming the western edge of bison distribution. Using 9384 historical journal observations from 1691–1928, we employ MaxEnt ecological niche modelling to identify suitable bison habitat across the Western Cordillera from bottom-up climatic, land cover, and topographic factors. We then use mixed-effect logistic regression to test if bison occurrence in journal records can be in part explained by the abundance of humans, wolves, or grizzly bears, in addition to MaxEnt-derived habitat suitability. We find support for our hypothesis because of the limited suitable habitat in the Rocky Mountains that likely prevented westward bison dispersal from their core habitat, and there was a negative relationship between bison occurrence and human harvest pressure. On this basis, we propose that intensive human harvest from large populations in the Western Cordillera, subsidized by other wildlife, salmon, and vegetation resources, is an underappreciated socioecological process that needs to be restored alongside bison populations. Co-managing bison with Indigenous peoples will also mitigate the adverse effects of overabundant bison populations and maximize the ecological and cultural benefits of bison restoration.

Mainstreaming the Ambition, Coherence, and Comprehensiveness of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework Into Conservation Policy

Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are finalizing a new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to more effectively guide efforts by the world’s nations to address global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Each party is required to mainstream the new framework and its component targets into national conservation strategies. To date, such strategies have been criticized as largely aspirational and lacking clear linkages to national policy mechanisms, which has contributed to the world’s general failure to meet the Convention’s previous targets. We use the United States and European Union as examples to compare and contrast opportunities and barriers for mainstreaming the GBF more effectively into policy. The European Union and United States have unique relationships to the Convention, the former being the only supranational party and the latter, having signed but never ratified the treaty, adopting Convention targets on an ad hoc basis. The contrasting conservation policy frameworks of these two polities illustrate several conceptual issues central to biodiversity conservation and demonstrate how insights from the GBF can strengthen biodiversity policy even in atypical contexts. We focus on three characteristics of the GBF which are essential if policy is to effectively motivate and guide efforts to halt and reverse biodiversity loss: comprehensiveness, coherence, and ambition. Statutes in both the United States and European Union provide a strong foundation for mainstreaming the GBF’s comprehensiveness, coherence, and ambition, but policy development and implementation falls short. We identify six common themes among the reforms needed to successfully achieve targets for reversing biodiversity loss: broadening conservation focus to all levels of biodiversity, better coordinating conservation strategies that protect sites and landscapes with those focused on biodiversity elements (e.g., species), coordinating biodiversity conservation with efforts to safeguard ecosystem services including ecosystem-based climate mitigation and adaptation, more coherent scaling of targets from global to local extents, adoption of a more ambitious vision for recovery of biodiversity, and development of effective tracking and accountability mechanisms.