Contribution of Protected Areas and Collective Lands Reducing Deforestation Rates in Colombia
Angela Mejia, Temple University, tun70896@temple.edu (Presenter)
Victor Hugo Gutierrez-Velez, Temple University, tug61163@temple.edu
Mary Blair, American Museum of Natural History, mblair1@amnh.org
Along with climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequalities are three main interconnected manifestations of the current global environmental crisis. Area-based conservation strategies have been for decades one of the main initiatives to protect natural ecosystems and biodiversity. These strategies have been shown to be effective at reducing pressure on biodiversity, but their effectiveness varies within contexts and the types of category of conservation. Along those lines, the tension between official protected areas and local communities has been largely discussed. For those reasons, this project aims to evaluate the contribution of different types of Area-Based Conservation Strategies (ABCSs) to reduce pressure on forests in Colombia. The evaluation was done by comparing the effect of drivers of deforestation on forest loss inside conservation areas with adjacent locations that represent similar pressures on forest conservation. The deforestation was calculated from a harmonization process between global products derived from Landsat and national remote sensing products. The comparison was performed with the application of Generalized Linear Mixed Models and supervised machine learning classification algorithms. Results show that collective lands such as Peasant Reserve Zones and Afro-Colombian communal lands are associated with a reduced deforestation probability. Current results also suggest that comparisons between collective lands and other ABCSs are largely influenced by variations in conditions regarding other deforestation drivers between locations. Beyond the type of ABCSs, distance to coca plantations and distance to roads where the two main pressures on deforestation. These results highlight the importance of measuring effectiveness of area-based conservation strategies relative to the magnitude of pressure associated with different drivers within the context of each conservation area. They also provide support toward the effectiveness of collective lands as a viable strategy for biodiversity conservation.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 1-55
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 1
Session Date: Tue (May 9) 5:00-7:00 PM
CCE Program: BDEC