Methods for calculating Protection Equality for conservation planning.

Area of Science:

• Conservation Science
• Biodiversity Monitoring
• Environmental Management

Background:

• Protected Areas (PAs) are crucial for global biodiversity conservation, with targets to expand terrestrial and marine coverage.
• Current PA expansion faces challenges in defining and assessing "ecological representation" of biodiversity.
• Existing PA networks may exhibit biases, protecting certain habitats or species disproportionately.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a systematic approach for measuring ecological representation in Protected Area networks.
• To introduce the Protection Equality (PE) metric and associated R package for standardized assessment.
• To evaluate the representativeness of PA networks using PE metrics in case studies.

Main Methods:

• Developed two Protection Equality (PE) metrics: proportional to area PE and fixed area PE.
• Utilized an R package to implement the PE metrics for quantitative analysis.
• Applied PE metrics to case studies on coral reef protection in the Coral Triangle and ecoregion representation in large countries.

Main Results:

• The PE metrics provide a transparent and repeatable method for assessing PA network representativeness.
• Results revealed significant shortcomings and biases in current PA networks regarding ecological feature protection.
• Demonstrated the utility of PE metrics for evaluating progress towards biodiversity conservation targets like Aichi Target 11.

Conclusions:

• The proposed PE metrics offer a standardized way to measure and report on ecological representation in PA networks.
• These metrics are adaptable for assessing various ecological features, including species, habitats, and processes.
• Implementing PE metrics can guide improvements in PA network design to ensure equitable biodiversity conservation.