DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY

EDWARD J. TAAFFE COLLOQUIUM

FRANK W. DAVIS

Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara

Setting conservation priorities in human-dominated ecosystems

Conserving land and water resources is usually a costly and contentious process, driven more by urgent needs and opportunities than by strategic analysis and design. The result is that nature reserves in the United States and elsewhere do a poor job of protecting species and ecosystems. Systematic conservation planning is an emergent field that spans the fields of geography, conservation biology and urban and regional planning and is concerned with theory and techniques to improve the scientific basis and cost-effectiveness of conservation efforts.

In this talk I will briefly review current spatial analytical approaches to setting conservation priorities. I will then present a new conservation-planning framework that combines aspects of land suitability analysis, land use scenarios, and reserve system design.  The framework is based on a hierarchy of competing conservation objectives and associated criteria, and uses cost-effectiveness analysis to maximize the overall utility of the conservation system that can be obtained with a fixed budget. The planning approach, which was developed for The Resources Agency of California, is designed to support collaborative processes and negotiation among competing interest groups.

I conclude by discussing some of the limitations of reserve-based conservation in the face of rapid and massive environmental change, including climate change, and suggest possible strategic responses and research needs.