Key Biodiversity Areas in Melanesia
Conservation of threatened species in Melanesia has been a rather neglected area to date except for the islands of New Caledonia and Fiji. Yet there has been no shortage of conservation investment in Melanesia over the past two decades, mostly targeting forest or reef conservation through incentives for customary landowners. But the ability of conservation planners to evaluate how much of this investment has contributed to avoiding further extinction is quite limited.
Conservation International has responded to this problem by focusing conservation investments on preventing extinctions. This is done through the definition of conservation ‘outcomes’ or targets at three general scales: species, site and landscape.
This paper presents the approach and results to date of defining conservation outcomes at the site scale, where sites are identified by the locations of globally threatened species requiring habitat protection.
Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA’s) are sites of important habitat requiring protection in order to avoid the extinction of threatened or endemic species. KBA’s are defined by the presence of Globally Threatened species, or 5% or more of the global population of Restricted Range species. The mapping of species habitat relies heavily on point locality data from collections or surveys, and published ecological information. GIS data layers are used to interpret ecological rules for habitat around known points, and to define areas as either known or potential habitat.
For Critically Endangered and Endangered Species, all known habitat generates a KBA, but for Vulnerable and Restricted Range species, there are generally spatial options for defining where a KBA should be. To deal with the many options generated by many species habitat polygons, KBA’s are prioritised using the optimisation software, MARXAN.
This paper presents the results to date, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of data-driven conservation planning for threatened species conservation in Melanesia.