Four challenges to an effective national nature assessment.

Comprehensive biodiversity assessments play an essential role in strengthening global and national conservation strategies. The recently announced first U.S. National Nature Assessment (NNA) provides an unparalleled opportunity to comprehensively review status and trends of biodiversity at all levels. This broad context can help in the coordination of actions to conserve individual species and ecosystems. The scientific assessments that informed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted at the 2022 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference of parties provide models for synthesizing information on trends at multiple levels of biodiversity, including decline in abundance and distribution of species, loss of populations and genetic diversity, and degradation and loss of ecosystems and their services. The assessments then relate these trends to data on drivers of biodiversity loss and pathways to their mitigation. The U.S. NNA can augment such global analyses and avoid the pitfalls encountered by previous U.S. efforts by ensuring policy-relevant design, data accessibility, and inclusivity in process and product and by incorporating spatial data relevant to national and subnational audiences. Although the United States is not formally a CBD party, an effective NNA should take full advantage of the global context by including indicators adopted at the 2022 meeting and incorporating an independent review mechanism that supports periodic stocktaking and ratcheting up of ambition in response to identified shortfalls in stemming biodiversity loss. The challenges to design of an effective U.S. assessment are relevant globally as nations develop assessments and reporting to support the new global biodiversity framework's targets. By considering and incorporating the diverse ways in which society values and benefits from nature, such assessments can help bridge the gap between research and conservation practice and communicate the extent of the biodiversity crisis to the public, fostering broad-based support for transformative change in humanity's relationship to the natural world.

Cuatro obstáculos para una eficaz evaluación nacional de la naturaleza Resumen Las evaluaciones completas de la biodiversidad tienen un papel esencial en el fortalecimiento de las estrategias de conservación nacional y mundial. La recién anunciada Evaluación Nacional de la Naturaleza (ENN) de los EE. UU. proporciona una oportunidad sin precedentes para revisar de manera completa el estado y las tendencias de la biodiversidad en todos los niveles. Este contexto generalizado puede ayudar a la coordinación de acciones para la conservación de especies individuales y ecosistemas. Las evaluaciones científicas que guiaron el Marco Mundial de la Biodiversidad de Kumming-Montreal adoptado en la conferencia de las partes de la Convención sobre la Diversidad Biológica (CBD) de 2022 proporcionan modelos para sintetizar la información sobre las tendencias de la biodiversidad a varios niveles, incluyendo la declinación en abundancia y distribución de especies, pérdida de poblaciones y diversidad genética y la degradación y pérdida de los ecosistemas y sus servicios. Después de esto, las evaluaciones relacionan estas tendencias con la información sobre los causantes de la pérdida de la biodiversidad y las maneras de mitigarla. La ENN de los EE. UU. pueden aumentar estos análisis mundiales y evitar las dificultades enfrentadas por los esfuerzos previos al garantizar un diseño relevante para las políticas, la disponibilidad de datos y la inclusión en el proceso y el producto y también mediante la incorporación de datos espaciales relevantes para el público nacional y subnacional. Aunque los EE. UU. no son una parte formal de la CBD, una ENN efectiva debería aprovechar de lleno el contexto global al incluir los indicadores adoptados en la reunión de 2022 e incorporar un mecanismo independiente de revisión que respalde el balance periódico y el aumento de la ambición en respuesta a las deficiencias detectadas en la contención de la pérdida de biodiversidad. Los retos para diseñar una evaluación estadunidense son relevantes a nivel mundial ya que los países evalúan y reportan para mantener los objetivos mundiales de biodiversidad post-2020. Si consideramos las diferentes maneras en las que la sociedad valora y se beneficia de la naturaleza, dichas evaluaciones pueden ayudar a cerrar la brecha entre la investigación y la práctica de la conservación y a comunicarle al público el nivel de la crisis de la biodiversidad, lo que fomenta el apoyo generalizado para transformar la relación entre la humanidad y el mundo natural.

The importance of being spatial (and reserved): assessing northern spotted owl habitat relationships with hierarchical Bayesian models.

Regional conservation planning increasingly draws on habitat suitability models to support decisions regarding land allocation and management. Nevertheless, statistical techniques commonly used for developing such models may give misleading results because they fail to account for 3 factors common in data sets of species distribution: spatial autocorrelation, the large number of sites where the species is absent (zero inflation), and uneven survey effort. We used spatial autoregressive models fit with Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to assess the relationship between older coniferous forest and the abundance of Northern Spotted Owl nest and activity sites throughout the species' range. The spatial random-effect term incorporated in the autoregressive models successfully accounted for zero inflation and reduced the effect of survey bias on estimates of species-habitat associations. Our results support the hypothesis that the relationship between owl distribution and older forest varies with latitude. A quadratic relationship between owl abundance and older forest was evident in the southern portion of the range, and a pseudothreshold relationship was evident in the northern portion of the range. Our results suggest that proposed changes to the network of owl habitat reserves would reduce the proportion of the population protected by up to one-third, and that proposed guidelines for forest management within reserves underestimate the proportion of older forest associated with maximum owl abundance and inappropriately generalize threshold relationships among subregions. Bayesian spatial models can greatly enhance the utility of habitat analysis for conservation planning because they add the statistical flexibility necessary for analyzing regional survey data while retaining the interpretability of simpler models.