Protected areas are a primary instrument for biodiversity conservation, and area-based targets have become a hallmark of global efforts, with the recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biological Framework recommending at least 30 percent of land and water be protected by 2030. More than 188 countries have signed on to ‘30x30’, and the U.S. has implemented its “America the Beautiful” plan, a similar call for local, state, and regionally-led efforts to conserve, connect, and restore 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
These commitments are a good start, but establishing isolated reserves is not sufficient for conserving biodiversity. Protected areas must be well connected in order to facilitate species dispersal, migration, and reproduction and effectively increase the resilience of conservation networks. The benefits of having a spatially connected protected area network are well established, yet there is little consensus on how connectivity should be assessed and even less guidance on how it should be measured and monitored for global target reporting.
In this talk, I will discuss how different spatial pattern metrics and geospatial methods are being used to prioritize locations for new protected areas and highlight some of the challenges the world is facing in developing generalizable methods for monitoring connectivity gains. Focusing on the U.S., I will show how the connectivity of the protected area network is well below where it needs to be to support biodiversity conservation, and how fragmented governance and reporting structures may be undermining efforts. Collectively, this work supports the development of standardized reporting frameworks that can be implemented across the world and highlights some of the challenges in coordinating spatial conservation goals across administrative units.
