Focusing species conservation efforts on national parks and wildlife corridors while neglecting the areas that surround them is taking a dangerously simplistic view and putting biodiversity at risk, according to an ANU academic.
Professor David Lindenmayer, Senior Fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, says that ecologists, environmental managers and governments have failed to recognise the significance of areas that surround conservation zones. Additionally, planning these areas has worked on the flawed assumption that the animals that inhabit them will see the zones in the same way and use them as humans want them to.
The findings were recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Professor Lindenmayer says the failure has important implications for governments and ecologists.
“This work shows that we have to think much more seriously about what’s around the patch – whether that patch is a forest, bushland or even an urban reserve. It’s an important complexity that gets overlooked when ecologists try to make things more simple than they actually are,” he said.
For decades ecologists have used the ‘species area curve’ – the idea that bigger patches will have more species - to plan biodiversity zones. But what they’ve failed to do, said Professor Lindenmayer, is realise the impact surrounding areas will have on the success of the biodiversity zones.
“In the past we’ve assumed that the area around a national park is a biological desert, but that’s not the case. How we manage our forests, agricultural land and all of the other things that surround them matter greatly to how many species are going to be occurring in the biodiversity zones.”
Professor Lindenmayer says many of the mistakes that have been made in planning biodiversity patches have been based on the false assumption that the animals they are trying to protect will recognise the different zones and use nature corridors as we expect them to.
“People think that because we call it a corridor that the species within it will find it and move along it, but there’s a lot of evidence that they will use the landscape in different ways – they may not use the so-called corridors. These things are conveniently forgotten about because it’s easier for us to think about management in simplistic terms.
“Wildlife doesn’t perceive the landscape in the same way as us. So we have to be much more strategic, sensible and think deeply about how we manage landscapes. It’s the sum of the parts that makes a big difference, which is why we have to be careful about not over-committing forests in places like Tasmania,” he said.
