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Landscape-scale benefits of protected areas for tropical biodiversity

Nature volume 620, pages 807–812 (2023)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 09 April 2024

A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 05 January 2024

This article has been updated

Abstract

The United Nations recently agreed to major expansions of global protected areas (PAs) to slow biodiversity declines1. However, although reserves often reduce habitat loss, their efficacy at preserving animal diversity and their influence on biodiversity in surrounding unprotected areas remain unclear2,3,4,5. Unregulated hunting can empty PAs of large animals6, illegal tree felling can degrade habitat quality7, and parks can simply displace disturbances such as logging and hunting to unprotected areas of the landscape8 (a phenomenon called leakage). Alternatively, well-functioning PAs could enhance animal diversity within reserves as well as in nearby unprotected sites9 (an effect called spillover). Here we test whether PAs across mega-diverse Southeast Asia contribute to vertebrate conservation inside and outside their boundaries. Reserves increased all facets of bird diversity. Large reserves were also associated with substantially enhanced mammal diversity in the adjacent unprotected landscape. Rather than PAs generating leakage that deteriorated ecological conditions elsewhere, our results are consistent with PAs inducing spillover that benefits biodiversity in surrounding areas. These findings support the United Nations goal of achieving 30% PA coverage by 2030 by demonstrating that PAs are associated with higher vertebrate diversity both inside their boundaries and in the broader landscape.

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Fig. 1: The effectiveness of PAs depends on safeguarding multiple facets of biodiversity.
Fig. 2: Site accessibility across Southeast Asia.
Fig. 3: All facets of bird diversity are higher inside PAs than outside PAs.
Fig. 4: All facets of mammal diversity outside PAs are higher near large PAs than near than small PAs.
Fig. 5: All facets of bird diversity outside PAs are higher near large PAs than near small PAs, but these differences are smaller than for mammals.

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Data availability

Data used in the mixed-effects modelling analysis are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22527298.v1. Rasters (1-km resolution) for the study area for the GEDI-derived forest structural covariates and estimated site accessibility are available at https://rcdata.nau.edu/geode_data/SEA_vertebrate_diversity_rasters/.

Code availability

Codes for analysis (in the R programming language) are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7796347.

Change history

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to numerous local communities, PA and government agency staff, research assistants and other partners for supporting the field data collection. Research permissions were granted by appropriate forestry and conservation government departments in each country. Special thanks are given to the Sarawak State Government, Sarawak Forestry Corporation, Forest Department Sarawak, Sabah Biodiversity Centre, the Danum Valley Management Committee, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM), the Smithsonian Institute and the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network, S. Bunyavejchewin and R. Sukmasuang. Support was provided by the United Nations Development Programme, NASA grants NNL15AA03C and 80NSSC21K0189, the National Geographic Society’s Committee for the Research and Exploration award #9384–13, the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award DECRA #DE210101440, the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, the Darwin Initiative, Liebniz-IZW, and the Universities of Aberdeen, British Columbia, Montana and Queensland.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

    Jedediah F. Brodie, Peter J. Williams & Olga E. Helmy

  2. Wildlife Biology Program, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

    Jedediah F. Brodie & Shu Woan Teoh

  3. Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Kota Samarahan, Malaysia

    Jedediah F. Brodie & Jayasilan Mohd-Azlan

  4. Department of Forest Resources Management, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Cheng Chen

  5. Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Cheng Chen

  6. Fauna and Flora International—Vietnam Programme, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Oliver R. Wearn

  7. Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Mairin C. M. Deith

  8. Department of Plant Sciences and Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    James G. C. Ball & David Coomes

  9. Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Eleanor M. Slade

  10. School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    David F. R. P. Burslem

  11. Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany

    An Nguyen

  12. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Jonathan H. Moore

  13. School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Jonathan H. Moore

  14. School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Scott J. Goetz, Patrick Burns, Patrick Jantz & Christopher R. Hakkenberg

  15. Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Zaneta M. Kaszta

  16. Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Zaneta M. Kaszta & Sam Cushman

  17. School of Forestry, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Sam Cushman

  18. Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula, MT, USA

    Olga E. Helmy

  19. The South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership (SEARRP), Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah, Malaysia

    Glen Reynolds

  20. IUCN Species Survival Commission, Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigation (IVIC) and Provita, Caracas, Venezuela

    Jon Paul Rodríguez

  21. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Walter Jetz

  22. Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Walter Jetz

  23. School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Matthew Scott Luskin

Authors
  1. Jedediah F. Brodie
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  2. Jayasilan Mohd-Azlan
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  3. Cheng Chen
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  4. Oliver R. Wearn
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  5. Mairin C. M. Deith
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  11. An Nguyen
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  13. Scott J. Goetz
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  14. Patrick Burns
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  18. Sam Cushman
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  19. David Coomes
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  20. Olga E. Helmy
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  21. Glen Reynolds
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  23. Walter Jetz
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  24. Matthew Scott Luskin
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Contributions

J.F.B. conceived the study and analysed the data. J.F.B., J.M.-A., C.C., O.R.W., .S.W.T., P.J.W., E.M.S., A.N., J.H.M. and M.S.L. led the camera-trapping field work. M.C.M.D. generated the potential hunting pressure map, P.B. processed the GEDI data, and J.G.C.B. conducted the interpolation of the GEDI data. J.F.B. wrote the initial manuscript, with input from M.S.L.; all authors contributed to revising and rewriting.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jedediah F. Brodie.

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Competing interests

Mammal data collection in one study area (out of 65) was funded by Sarawak Energy Berhad; no personnel from that agency participated in the data collection or analysis or reviewed the manuscript before it was submitted.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature thanks Robert Bagchi, Erik Meijaard, Hao Tang, Morgan Tingley and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1

Estimates of sampling completeness – the correspondence between the number of species detected at sampling locations and the number estimated from rarefaction-extrapolation (see Methods) for birds (panel a; Pearson’s r = 0.91) and mammals (b; r = 0.79), with 1 : 1 lines shown.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Directed acyclic graph of bird or mammal diversity in relation to exposure variables and covariates.

The structure of the graph shows how the influence of protected areas on diversity are de-confounded from the influence of forest structure and site accessibility.

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Brodie, J.F., Mohd-Azlan, J., Chen, C. et al. Landscape-scale benefits of protected areas for tropical biodiversity. Nature 620, 807–812 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06410-z

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