Using climatic-geomorphological surrogates to identify complete and incidental freshwater conservation gaps within large river basins in China
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Author(s)
Mu, Y
Li, X
Guo, Y
Liang, C
Bai, J
Linke, S
Cui, B
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2021
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Freshwater wetlands play an important role in preserving global biodiversity and substantial ecosystem services, but they are exposed to higher pressures and threats and have received less attention in conservation planning in comparison to terrestrial ecosystems. Although a number of freshwater protected areas have been established in China, considerable freshwater conservation gaps still exist where ecologically valuable freshwater wetlands are vulnerable to anthropogenic threats, our study therefore explored systematic conservation planning specifically suited to freshwater ecosystems for the large river basins in China. ...
View more >Freshwater wetlands play an important role in preserving global biodiversity and substantial ecosystem services, but they are exposed to higher pressures and threats and have received less attention in conservation planning in comparison to terrestrial ecosystems. Although a number of freshwater protected areas have been established in China, considerable freshwater conservation gaps still exist where ecologically valuable freshwater wetlands are vulnerable to anthropogenic threats, our study therefore explored systematic conservation planning specifically suited to freshwater ecosystems for the large river basins in China. A scheme of Climatic-geomorphological Classification of Freshwater Ecosystems (CGCFEs) was developed and employed as broad-scale surrogates based on their unique ecohydrological processes and biodiversity assemblages. A freshwater conservation assessment was conducted for each river basin using a complementarity-based planning framework (i.e., systematic conservation planning) and the prioritization software Marxan in consideration of the conservation targets of CGCFEs. Our research also demonstrated the need to introduce the concept of incidental gaps (IGs) in freshwater conservation planning, where the focal species and ecosystems have unintentionally been incorporated into a nature reserve with different conservation targets and thus created “conservation gaps” due to incidental and unfocused conservation efforts. The identified complete gaps (CGs) and IGs accounted for 10.56% and 8.66% of the total freshwater area respectively, implicating the need to enhance freshwater conservation efficacy by realigning existing conservation patterns to address these gaps. Our research provides a spatially explicit freshwater conservation strategy at the river basin and national scales and thus enables the central government and wetland resource managers to set ecologically meaningful spatial conservation priorities for freshwater ecosystems within those major large river basins. In addition, the methodology of using CGCFEs can be replicated for large-scale freshwater conservation planning elsewhere and promote freshwater conservation efficiency by capturing irreplaceable freshwater habitats.
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View more >Freshwater wetlands play an important role in preserving global biodiversity and substantial ecosystem services, but they are exposed to higher pressures and threats and have received less attention in conservation planning in comparison to terrestrial ecosystems. Although a number of freshwater protected areas have been established in China, considerable freshwater conservation gaps still exist where ecologically valuable freshwater wetlands are vulnerable to anthropogenic threats, our study therefore explored systematic conservation planning specifically suited to freshwater ecosystems for the large river basins in China. A scheme of Climatic-geomorphological Classification of Freshwater Ecosystems (CGCFEs) was developed and employed as broad-scale surrogates based on their unique ecohydrological processes and biodiversity assemblages. A freshwater conservation assessment was conducted for each river basin using a complementarity-based planning framework (i.e., systematic conservation planning) and the prioritization software Marxan in consideration of the conservation targets of CGCFEs. Our research also demonstrated the need to introduce the concept of incidental gaps (IGs) in freshwater conservation planning, where the focal species and ecosystems have unintentionally been incorporated into a nature reserve with different conservation targets and thus created “conservation gaps” due to incidental and unfocused conservation efforts. The identified complete gaps (CGs) and IGs accounted for 10.56% and 8.66% of the total freshwater area respectively, implicating the need to enhance freshwater conservation efficacy by realigning existing conservation patterns to address these gaps. Our research provides a spatially explicit freshwater conservation strategy at the river basin and national scales and thus enables the central government and wetland resource managers to set ecologically meaningful spatial conservation priorities for freshwater ecosystems within those major large river basins. In addition, the methodology of using CGCFEs can be replicated for large-scale freshwater conservation planning elsewhere and promote freshwater conservation efficiency by capturing irreplaceable freshwater habitats.
View less >
Journal Title
Global Ecology and Conservation
Volume
30
Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
Subject
Environmental sciences
Ecology