Evaluating the effectiveness of conservation and development investments in reducing deforestation and fires in Ankeniheny-Zahemena Corridor, Madagascar.

Forest conservation and REDD+ projects invest millions of dollars each year to reduce local communities' dependence on forests and prevent forest loss and degradation. However, to date, there is limited evidence on whether these investments are effective at delivering conservation outcomes. We explored the relationships between 600+ small-scale conservation and development investments that occurred from 2007 to 2014 and conservation outcomes (deforestation rates and fire detections) within Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor in Madagascar using linear fixed effects panel regressions. We derived annual changes in forest cover and fires from satellite remote sensing. We found a statistically significant correlation between presence of any investment and reduced deforestation rates in 2010 and 2011 -years with accelerated deforestation elsewhere in the study area. This result indicated investments abated deforestation rates during times of political instability and lack of governance following a 2009 coup in Madagascar. We also found a statistically significant relationship between presence of any investment and reduced fire detections in the study area, suggesting investments had an impact on reducing burning of forest for agriculture. For both outcomes (i.e., deforestation rates and fire detections), we found that more dollars invested led to greater conservation outcomes (i.e. fewer fires or less deforestation), particularly when funding was sustained for one to two years. Our findings suggest that conservation and development investments can reduce deforestation and fire incidence, but also highlight the many challenges and complexities in assessing relationships between investments and conservation outcomes in a dynamic landscape and a volatile political context.

Rapid Assessment of Ecosystem Service Co-Benefits of Biodiversity Priority Areas in Madagascar.

The importance of ecosystems for supporting human well-being is increasingly recognized by both the conservation and development sectors. Our ability to conserve ecosystems that people rely on is often limited by a lack of spatially explicit data on the location and distribution of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits provided by nature to people. Thus there is a need to map ES to guide conservation investments, to ensure these co-benefits are maintained. To target conservation investments most effectively, ES assessments must be rigorous enough to support conservation planning, rapid enough to respond to decision-making timelines, and often must rely on existing data. We developed a framework for rapid spatial assessment of ES that relies on expert and stakeholder consultation, available data, and spatial analyses in order to rapidly identify sites providing multiple benefits. We applied the framework in Madagascar, a country with globally significant biodiversity and a high level of human dependence on ecosystems. Our objective was to identify the ES co-benefits of biodiversity priority areas in order to guide the investment strategy of a global conservation fund. We assessed key provisioning (fisheries, hunting and non-timber forest products, and water for domestic use, agriculture, and hydropower), regulating (climate mitigation, flood risk reduction and coastal protection), and cultural (nature tourism) ES. We also conducted multi-criteria analyses to identify sites providing multiple benefits. While our approach has limitations, including the reliance on proximity-based indicators for several ES, the results were useful for targeting conservation investments by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). Because our approach relies on available data, standardized methods for linking ES provision to ES use, and expert validation, it has the potential to quickly guide conservation planning and investment decisions in other data-poor regions.

Extinction risks and the conservation of Madagascar's reptiles.

BACKGROUND: An understanding of the conservation status of Madagascar's endemic reptile species is needed to underpin conservation planning and priority setting in this global biodiversity hotspot, and to complement existing information on the island's mammals, birds and amphibians. We report here on the first systematic assessment of the extinction risk of endemic and native non-marine Malagasy snakes, lizards, turtles and tortoises. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Species range maps from The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species were analysed to determine patterns in the distribution of threatened reptile species. These data, in addition to information on threats, were used to identify priority areas and actions for conservation. Thirty-nine percent of the data-sufficient Malagasy reptiles in our analyses are threatened with extinction. Areas in the north, west and south-east were identified as having more threatened species than expected and are therefore conservation priorities. Habitat degradation caused by wood harvesting and non-timber crops was the most pervasive threat. The direct removal of reptiles for international trade and human consumption threatened relatively few species, but were the primary threats for tortoises. Nine threatened reptile species are endemic to recently created protected areas. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: With a few alarming exceptions, the threatened endemic reptiles of Madagascar occur within the national network of protected areas, including some taxa that are only found in new protected areas. Threats to these species, however, operate inside and outside protected area boundaries. This analysis has identified priority sites for reptile conservation and completes the conservation assessment of terrestrial vertebrates in Madagascar which will facilitate conservation planning, monitoring and wise-decision making. In sharp contrast with the amphibians, there is significant reptile diversity and regional endemism in the southern and western regions of Madagascar and this study highlights the importance of these arid regions to conserving the island's biodiversity.

Climate change and the cost of conserving species in Madagascar.

We examined the cost of conserving species as climate changes. We used a Maxent species distribution model to predict the ranges from 2000 to 2080 of 74 plant species endemic to the forests of Madagascar under 3 climate scenarios. We set a conservation target of achieving 10,000 ha of forest cover for each species and calculated the cost of achieving this target under each scenario. We interviewed managers of projects to restore native forests and conducted a literature review to obtain the net present cost per hectare of management actions to maintain or establish forest cover. For each species, we added hectares of land from lowest to highest cost per additional year of forest cover until the conservation target was achieved throughout the time period. Climate change was predicted to reduce the size of species' ranges, the overlap between species' ranges and existing or planned protected areas, and the overlap between species' ranges and existing forest. As a result, climate change increased the cost of achieving the conservation target by necessitating successively more costly management actions: additional management within existing protected areas (US$0-60/ha); avoidance of forest degradation (i.e., loss of biomass) in community-managed areas ($160-576/ha); avoidance of deforestation in unprotected areas ($252-1069/ha); and establishment of forest on nonforested land within protected areas ($802-2710/ha), in community-managed areas ($962-3226/ha), and in unprotected areas ($1054-3719/ha). Our results suggest that although forest restoration may be required for the conservation of some species as climate changes, it is more cost-effective to maintain existing forest wherever possible.