Reckoning the impact of social values on spatial conservation priorities

Here is a good paper on coming to terms with impact of social values on spatial conservation priorities. Impact of social values has a very important place, in the scheme of things, while devising conservation strategies. The scientists used conservation planning software Zonation to arrive at some interesting conclusions.  Conservation planners will find the paper very useful.

Integrating Biological and Social Values When Prioritizing Places for Biodiversity Conservation

A paper by

AMY L. WHITEHEAD1, HEINI KUJALA, CHRISTOPHER D. IVES, ASCELIN GORDON, PIA E. LENTINI, BRENDAN A. WINTLE, EMILY NICHOLSON and CHRISTOPHER M. RAYMOND

Conservation Biology, Volume 28, Issue 4, pages 992–1003, August 2014

  The cascading impact of social values on spatial conservation priorities has received little attention from scientists and is poorly understood. Here the scientists present an approach that incorporates quantitative data on social values for conservation and social preferences for development into spatial conservation planning. They undertook a peoples’ participation GIS survey to spatially represent social values and development preferences and used species distribution models for 7 threatened fauna species to represent biological values. These spatially explicit data were incorporated in the conservation planning software Zonation to examine how conservation priorities changed with the inclusion of social data. Integrating spatially explicit information about social values and development preferences with biological data produced prioritizations that differed spatially from the solution based on only biological data. However, the integrated solutions protected a similar proportion of the species’ distributions, indicating the fact that Zonation effectively combined the biological and social data to produce socially feasible conservation solutions of approximately equivalent biological value. The scientists were able to identify areas of the landscape where synergies and conflicts between different value sets are likely to occur. They emphasize that Identification of these synergies and conflicts will allow decision makers to devise communication strategies to specific areas and in turn ensure effective community engagement and positive conservation outcomes.