What Is Inverse Spatial Conservation Prioritization

The assignment this week challenged us to utilize our course objectives to address the requirements of the assignment. The objectives include how to apply the concepts of political ecology to environmental concerns, analyze the link between social, cultural, geographic, cultural, political factors, and environmental change, as well as assess methodological approaches used for research in political ecology. In addition, this assignment will discuss how reserves and national parks have been socially constructed/produced to be protected areas. Following this discussion, the conversation will include an overview of how this construction of national parks and reserves may result in the property rights reconstructing the resource into a rival good. Moreover, I will provide a brief discussion on the relationship between social construction of nature and environmental change. In conclusion, I will briefly review case studies and frameworks that are related to the conservation of biodiversity.

Duerksen, C. & Snyder, C., (2005). Nature-friendly communities: habitat protection and land use. Case Study for Austin, TX; Washington, DC: Island Press Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.apus.edu/lib/apus/Doc?id=10149942

One of such resources that are exploited by a human being is south Florida ecosystem in the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades ecosystem is water resource. Most of the water in the river the Kissimmee and Lake Okeechobee have been converted to the canal of agricultural water. As a result, ecosystem within the river and lake- terrestrial ecosystem was destroyed as some of the surrounding wetland were destroyed and this destruction had an impact on the survival of the ecosystems without sufficient flowing water to support it. The result of this destruction was the loss of 20,000 acres of the wetlands. Another exploitation that occurs in this ecosystem is clearing of forest for timbers used for construction and agricultural land (Kiker, C. F., Milon, J. W., & Hodges, A. W.

Economically, new land expansion is always viewed as beneficial. When companies or industries look to build new factories or houses, their end goal is always to make a profit. However, individual advancement in this case has to be sacrificed for the greater good of the rest of the stakeholders. For example, mining industries and residential lots

Require establishment of biodiversity offsets for all oil sands development to offset impacts to all habitat types. To ensure a net positive environmental benefit and address existing cumulative effects, offsets should be established with a 3:1 offset ratio — three hectares of land should be conserved or restored for every hectare of new disturbance that occurs within the Boreal Forest Natural Region.

Half Earth by E.O. Wilson (2016) deals with the complicated nature of conservation. The book is clearly written by a man who values every aspect of biodiversity, even to the point of disregarding certain key arguments against protected areas. This paper will summarize Wilson’s argument in Half Earth, along with his suggested solutions. To close, the concept of making half the earth a protected area has many positives and negatives that will be evaluated. Leakage, indigenous populations, and possible habitat fragmentation are all issues around protected areas that will be analyzed. The fact of the matter is that Wilson’s argument is complicated by works by other academics and authors.

Conservation banking took the idea of wetland banking and transformed it into threatened and endangered species conservation with a few alterations. The primary objective of wetland mitigation is to meet the no net loss goal by replacing the acreage and function of the wetland areas that will be impacted by a proposed project. The goal of

Costa Rica has set aside a larger percentage of its land for biodiversity conservation than the United States has because it is more valuable for Costa Rica’s economy. The United States is larger than Costa Rica so it can benefit its economy in more ways such as exploiting the land. Costa Rica also is a popular site for tourists because of their natural rain forests. If more land is set aside for biodiversity conservation in Costa Rica, they will receive money from tourists which helps them financially as well. The United States should reserve more of its land for this purpose because the more biodiversity they have, the more financially stable they will be as country. Protecting biodiversity in the United States is a more efficient process

Multifunctional management would not only satisfy economic and social demand without any loss of environment values, but also provide alternative options or development potential for future generations. It is essential to understand today’s needs and values of public lands and recognize economic benefits and social benefits of public lands in modern society.

A conservation is an area of an ecosystem or nature that is being protected and preserved. The first half of the article describes four phases that have framed conservation and the time periods they take place in. These phases have great distinction between one another. They tell of how each conservation was perceived in that time and the science underpinning in them. The second half of the article discusses how the conservations can meet a happy middle of the four framing phases. The issue is ongoing but humans are figuring out what to do with conservations now.

In this paper we define such urban landscape as urban-coastal fringe. Modeling of the urban-coastal fringe is inherently more complex and nuanced, but in the end may provide a more robust means for directing goal setting, urban planning, as well as conservation and restoration efforts. There are several existing ecosystem service models and valuation tools (See Drakou et al. 2014 for review). Drakou et al. categorize the existing tools into three broad categories, including data cataloguers, toolkits that allow one to model ecosystem service flows for a site, and a combination of both that are custom for specific region. Recent efforts have resulted in the development of several models that assess the impact of development on service flow, including the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model and the Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services (MIMES) model (Boumans and Costanza 2007; Nelson et al. 2009;Gomez-Baggethun et al. 2010; Kareiva et al. 2011; Calvet-Mir et al. 2012; Crossman et al. 2013). However, these models are best applied at a regional scale and do not operate at a scale fine enough to address the services generated by the urban core. The HERCULES model,

US wetlands compensation system highlights on qualifying potential bankers which will meet the biodiversity offsets goals. This system proved that banking will provide more offset credits. Through this approach, U.S. has a great experience of biodiversity offsets.

In comparing the above cost of conservation to the one in Queensland, Australia, and considering the future expansion of protected area in Queensland. The total area and the total expected cost was selected, and the potential unexpected cost for the area was calculated. The government committed to add approximately 12 million ha to 8 million ha protected area bringing the total area protected to 20 million ha by 2020. Maxan was used to estimate the cost with data on actual land value, market value, transaction costs and land tenure. The minimum area that was added was 18 million and maximum was 29 million ha. Approximately 2.3 million ha was selected by Maxan due to its low costs compared to other tenures. This brings the total cost to range from $214 million to $2.9 billion with a large cost associated with larger percentage acquisition assumptions (Adams et al. 2011). The area needing acquisition ranged from about 6 million ha to 10 million ha with an addition of 33% that is, 4 million ha to the national park estate. The total expected cost with the additional 4 million ha ranges from $250 million to $1.6 billion. The $250 million minimum cost was estimated based on 10%/1000 ha objectives and assumption on property subdivision which is 30% freehold and 0% leasehold acquisition. On average,

The introduction of ecological planning and consideration of environmentally sensitive areas as a relevant form of regulation are proposed here

⇒ Long term effect: protecting animals and biodiversity is important as it represents a complete ecosystems, whose balance is very fragile. If a species or an ecosystem disappear, it will have impact on other species of animals and plants and can create a snowball effect. Thus, it is very important to preserve the environmental balance as it is. Besides, if the country destroys its natural beauty and diversity, tourists would rather go to other countries that