Cost-effective species conservation in exurbancommunities: A spatial analysis

摘要

Exurban areas have increasingly become zones of conflict asconservation and development compete for the same finite landresources. Conversion of natural areas to land dominated by humanuse results in loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlifehabitat which often lead to species endangerment or evenextinction. Recently, reserve site selection models have begun tointegrate spatial attributes in order to design more compact andconnected reserve networks that are thought to improve long-termspecies persistence. While these models are a good step forward todesigning conservation reserve networks, they might not beadequate for use in exurban areas that consist of heterogeneousmosaics of land uses where habitat fragmentation already existsand not all parcels are available for preservation. This paperpresents a species conservation framework that expands upontraditional reserve site selection models in three ways. First,because of the focus on exurban areas, the framework used hereallows for land conversion within core habitat patches. Second, theframework provides a more robust assessment of connectivityamong patches by accounting for land-use heterogeneity in thedispersal matrix. And third, the framework explicitly incorporatesspecies population dynamics. We apply our conservation frame-work to the case of pond-breeding salamanders in an exurbancommunity in Rhode Island, USA. Comparisons are made betweenthe outcomes for uniform conservation policies and more flexiblepolicies that accommodate ecological and economic heterogeneity.