Network of Conservation Educators & Practitioners Assessing Threats in Conservation Planning and Management: Synthesis Author(s): Madhu Rao, Arlyne Johnson, and Nora Bynum Source: Lessons in Conservation, Vol. 1, pp. 44-71 Published by: Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History Stable URL: ncep.amnh.org/linc/ This article is featured in Lessons in Conservation, the official journal of the Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners (NCEP). NCEP is a collaborative project of the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) and a number of institutions and individuals around the world. Lessons in Conservation is designed to introduce NCEP teaching and learning resources (or “modules”) to a broad audience. NCEP modules are designed for undergraduate and professional level education. These modules—and many more on a variety of conservation topics—are available for free download at our website, ncep.amnh.org. To learn more about NCEP, visit our website: ncep.amnh.org. All reproduction or distribution must provide full citation of the original work and provide a copyright notice as follows: “Copyright 2007, by the authors of the material and the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation of the American Museum of Natural History. All rights reserved.” Illustrations obtained from the American Museum of Natural History’s library: images.library.amnh.org/digital/ SYNTHESIS 44 Assessing Threats in Conservation Planning and Management Madhu Rao,* Arlyne Johnson, † and Nora Bynum ‡ * Wildlife Conservation Society, New York, NY, U.S.A., email [email protected] † Wildlife Conservation Society, New York, NY, U.S.A., email [email protected] ‡ The American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, U.S.A., email [email protected] D. Brumbaugh Assessing Threats in Conservation Lessons in Conservation Planning and Management http://ncep.amnh.org/linc SYNTHESIS 45 Table of Contents Conceptual Roadmap of the Synthesis and Relationship to Other NCEP Mod- ules.........................................................................................................................46 Introduction...........................................................................................................47 What Targets Should be Conserved?.................................................................47 How Should Conservation Strategies be Designed?..........................................47 Are Conservation Strategies Effective in Achieving Conservation Goals?..........47 Assessing Threats in Conservation Planning...........................................................48 Priority Setting at the Species-level..................................................................48 Priority Setting at Global, Regional, and Local (Site) Scales.................................49 Table 1: Priority Setting at the Species-level....................................................50 Table 2: Assessing Threats in Global, Regional, and Site-Level Conservation Plan- ning...................................................................................................................51 Site Conservation Planning Tools.......................................................................54 Conceptual Models........................................................................................54 Figure 1: The Three Main Components of a Conceptual Model.......................54 TNC’s Conservation Action Planning (CAP) (TNC, 2005)............................55 Evaluating Management Effectiveness Using Threat Assessment..............................56 Box 1. Local-scale Conservation Planning: Developing Conservation Strategies for the Yunnan Great Rivers Project (The Nature Conservancy)......................57 Assessing the Status of Threats........................................................................58 Measurement of Ecological Integrity................................................................58 Box 2. Threat Assessment in the Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Area Management (RAPPAM) Methodology (Ervin, 2003b)................................59 Box 3. Application of the Rappam Methodology to Evaluate Management Ef- fectiveness of Four National Parks in Bhutan...................................................60 Table 3: Threat Impact Monitoring...................................................................61 Threat Monitoring in Practice...........................................................................61 Threat Reduction Assessment (Salafsky and Margoluis, 1999)......................61 The Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Area Management....62 Table 4: Comparison of Threat Assessment Methods........................................63 Box 4. Protected Area Threats: Findings in Brief....................................................64 The Importance of Assessing Threats in Biodiversity Conservation....................65 Terms of Use..........................................................................................................66 Literature Cited.......................................................................................................66 Glossary..................................................................................................................69 Assessing Threats in Conservation Lessons in Conservation Planning and Management http://ncep.amnh.org/linc SYNTHESIS 46 Assessing Threats in Conservation Planning and Management Madhu Rao, Arlyne Johnson, and Nora Bynum Conceptual Roadmap of the Synthesis and to conservation targets in order to select appropriate con- Relationship to Other NCEP Modules servation strategies. The synthesis reviews two planning tools used in site conservation: conceptual models and The Nature This synthesis reviews the role of threat assessment in con- Conservancy’s Conservation Action Planning approach. servation planning and management in setting conservation targets (what targets to conserve?), identifying priority strate- The second part of the synthesis reviews the role of threat gies (how to conserve?), and determining their effectiveness assessment in measuring management effectiveness with (are strategies effective?). reference to monitoring approaches that fall into two broad categories: (1) the assessment of the status and impacts of The first part of the synthesis includes an overview of the threats, and (2) the measurement of ecological integrity of use of threat assessment in conservation planning (what conservation targets. and how to conserve) by focusing on two broad aspects: (1) species-level, and (2) global-, regional-, and local(site)-level This section concludes with a comparison of threat monitor- priority setting. ing methodologies focusing on two approaches: Threat Re- duction Assessment and Rapid Assessment and Prioritization The section on species-level priority setting briefly discusses of Protected Area Management. the IUCN Red List Programme, BirdLife International’s Im- portant Bird Areas (IBAs) Programme, Key Biodiversity Areas, This overview is closely linked yet significantly different in and range-level priority setting for individual species (e.g., focus from two other related modules, An Overview of Threats Jaguar Conservation Units, Tiger Conservation Units). The to Biodiversity and Monitoring for Adaptive Management in Con- four approaches use threats as one of many criteria to priori- servation Biology. An Overview of Threats provides a discussion tize species or their habitats. on the various direct threats to biodiversity such as habitat fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, overexploitation, The section on global-scale priority setting discusses the use and global climate change. There is a detailed description of of threat assessment in four approaches that identify the entire each category of threat and ecological impacts on biodiversity planet as the planning universe, and then attempt to iden- and processes sustaining biodiversity. tify places that require conservation attention: Hot Spots, Last Wild Places, Global 200, and Frontier Forests. Following this, Monitoring for Adaptive Management in Conservation Biology the synthesis reviews the use of threat assessment in regional- provides essential concepts for designing successful monitor- scale priority-setting approaches such as The Nature Con- ing projects that directly serve conservation efforts through servancy’s seven-step planning framework and World Wildlife adaptive management. According to Margoluis and Salafsky Fund’s Ecoregion Based Conservation which involve select- (1998), all three parts of any conservation project can be mon- ing one or a cluster of ecologically defined regions as the itored: the state of the target condition (species, ecosystems, planning universe and establishing a set of geographic priori- protected areas, etc.), the success in mitigating threats to the ties and strategies within them. In local-scale priority setting, target condition, and the process of implementing interven- the role of threat assessment is to identify and rank threats tions. The module primarily focuses on monitoring the state Assessing Threats in Conservation Lessons in Conservation Planning and Management http://ncep.amnh.org/linc SYNTHESIS 47 of the target condition, which could be a particular species, a alone such as diversity, endemism, uniqueness, or the value of suite of species, a protected area, an ecosystem