Challenges and opportunities in planning for the conservation of Neotropical seasonally dry forests into the future

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Highlights

  • Global climate and land-use changes will decrease opportunities to protect Neotropical seasonally dry forests.

  • Existing protected areas only cover ~11% of these forests, representing ~13% of remnant ranges for species in the 2050’s.

  • Protecting 6% more of NSDFs area would imply a strategic improvement for its long-term conservation.

  • It is critical for NSDF to improve and increase the conservation area networks in Venezuela and Mexico.

  • Those areas where it is expected that species will persist are essential to reach appropriate long-term conservation.

Abstract

Increasing evidence indicates that distribution of Neotropical seasonally dry forests (NSDFs) and the survival of the species and communities that inhabit them have been negatively affected by land-use modifications and global climate change (GCC). Protected Areas (PAs) in the region are inefficient and insufficient, and these human-driven threats are expected to further diminish their effectiveness. Research on the long-term effectiveness of these areas for NSDFs protection is therefore a high priority. Here, using birds as a study group, we combined both species distribution modelling and systematic conservation planning techniques to delineate priority areas where species are predicted to persist into the 2050's in the face of GCC and land conversion across the NSDFs distribution. These analyses showed an imperative need to improve the performance of PAs, which covered only ~11% of the NSDFs area and included on average just 13% of species' remaining distributions in the 2050's. The most important opportunity for improving NSDFs conservation status is provided by protecting ~6% more surface area, which could increase the level of protection in the near future: 24.8–28.2% of species distributions on average and 36.9–39.5% for those threatened and Data Deficit species. Besides, 21.6% for these proposed areas coincide with areas currently defined as priority for NSDFs, and 22.8% coincides with priority areas for conservation and research of terrestrial vertebrates. The priority areas identified are mainly distributed in Mexico (70.8%). Our findings pinpoint major opportunities for efficient conservation planning in the region, if there is political will to do so.

Introduction

Protected areas (PAs) are the mainstay of planning instrument for in situ conservation of natural ecosystems and biodiversity. However, PAs alone cannot represent the full extent of biodiversity (Rodrigues et al., 2004; Eklund et al., 2011; Venter et al., 2018). In fact, over the last two decades, serious concerns have been expressed about the long-term conservation efficiency of the world's existing PAs in times of rapid climate change (Jones et al., 2018; Maxwell et al., 2020). There is clear empirical evidences of the effects of Global Climate Change (GCC) on the distribution of biodiversity (Lovejoy and Hannah, 2019), including a widespread population declines, climate-related species extinctions, and reorganization of species assemblages (e.g. Lenoir et al., 2008; Zwiener et al., 2018; Prieto-Torres et al., 2020). This reorganization of biodiversity could also have strong impacts on the effectiveness of PAs globally, for example by decreasing the representation of key conservation groups within PAs networks in biodiversity hotspots (e.g. Ferro et al., 2014). As such, and in accordance with Aichi targets number 17 (CBD, 2010), it has been proposed that PAs systems should be expanded in ways that increase resilience in light of the potential effects of GCC on species distributions (Carroll et al., 2010). Although this is imperative, only a small percentage of the studies in Latin America that suggest key places for PAs expansion have acknowledged this fact (Nori et al., 2018; but see Pearson et al., 2019).

The fact that existing PAs are mainly fixed and isolated makes them poorly suited to accommodating the effects of GCC on biodiversity (Hannah et al., 2007; Bruno et al., 2018). Thus designing conservation areas that are flexible, connected, and specifically account for the predicted effects of GCC is more urgent than ever to guide effective management policies for biodiversity long-term protection (e.g. Nori et al., 2018; Triviño et al., 2018). This latter is particularly important for areas that simultaneously host high levels of species richness and endemism and are heavily threatened (Jones et al., 2018; Lovejoy and Hannah, 2019; Peters et al., 2019); such as the Neotropical seasonally dry forests (NSDFs).

NSDFs are frequently highlighted among the most threatened ecosystems in the world due to severe anthropogenic disturbance associated with logging, agriculture, fire, and GCC (Miles et al., 2006; Portillo-Quintero and Sánchez-Azofeifa, 2010; Prieto-Torres et al., 2016, Prieto-Torres et al., 2020), and also as a conservation priority for scientific research (Sánchez-Azofeifa et al., 2005; Banda et al., 2016; Escribano-Avila et al., 2017; Prieto-Torres et al., 2018). Thus, considering their unique and rich biodiversity (e.g. for plants, Banda et al., 2016; for birds, Prieto-Torres et al., 2019), several assessments and priority-setting initiatives have suggested conservation and restoration actions in these forests. However, there are currently fewer conservation initiatives addressing NSDFs than for other Neotropical terrestrial ecosystems, such as the Amazonian and Andes Montane forests (Barber et al., 2014; Bax and Francesconi, 2019; Peters et al., 2019; Rivas et al., 2020). As a result, current PAs encompass less than 10% of total NSDFs area, and the representativeness of biota within the current PAs network is woefully inadequate (Portillo-Quintero and Sánchez-Azofeifa, 2010; Banda et al., 2016; Prieto-Torres et al., 2018). In this context, key areas have been recently proposed to efficiently expand the PA system of the NSDFs, which could greatly increase the representation of biodiversity (see Prieto-Torres et al., 2018; Rivas et al., 2020). However, new evidence indicates that NSDFs distribution and survival of inhabiting species (both threatened and non-threatened) could be strongly affected by GCC, in addition to the highly dynamic boundary between conserved area and agricultural lands region (Miles et al., 2006; Portillo-Quintero and Sánchez-Azofeifa, 2010).

Among the recent findings of effects of GCC on NSDFs biodiversity, it has been proposed that the distribution ranges of over 50% of species are expected to decrease compared to present, with uneven structural reorganization at the community level (Prieto-Torres et al., 2016, Prieto-Torres et al., 2020), which is also expected to lead to an overall reduction in alpha phylogenetic and functional diversity across NSDFs (e.g. Hidasi-Neto et al., 2019; Menéndez-Guerrero et al., 2020). Furthermore, previous studies suggest that several species may not persist in human-modified landscapes in the absence of large forest fragments (Krishnadas et al., 2019), which can drive biotic homogenization, changing ecological communities for these highly vulnerable forests (Vázquez-Reyes et al., 2017). Such changes in biodiversity highlight the challenges that both threats impose for the long-term protection of NSDFs. Thus, it is extremely important and urgent to specifically consider the potential effects of GCC on species' distribution as well as future land-use changes to complement existing information on conservation planning in the NSDFs in order to support policy makers at both national and international scales (Miles et al., 2006; Banda et al., 2016; Escribano-Avila et al., 2017; Prieto-Torres et al., 2018; Rivas et al., 2020).

To address these challenges, different conservation planning schemes have been developed over the last decade (e.g. Ciarleglio et al., 2009; Sarkar and Illoldi-Rangel, 2010; Moilanen et al., 2014). These approaches help to identify the most important sites for conservation by considering the most serious threats to biodiversity, such as GCC, promoting well-informed decisions for a representative and connected PAs network that contributes to the viability of biodiversity and ecosystem function (Carroll et al., 2010; Groves et al., 2012; Bregman et al., 2014; Nori et al., 2018). Unfortunately, information on the distributions of most species is incomplete or biased by site accessibility (Gaston and Rodrigues, 2003; Peterson et al., 2018). Given that spatial and taxonomic representation of biodiversity is uneven at the regional level, the integration of species-level surrogates is often necessary to ensure that critical habitats and ecosystems within the region are not missed (e.g. Lessmann et al., 2014; Nori et al., 2016; Prieto-Torres et al., 2018; Triviño et al., 2018).

Here, we focused on birds as surrogates of biodiversity because they are well-known and highly diverse in NSDFs as well as having high levels of endemism (Prieto-Torres et al., 2019). Birds are also important in tropical ecosystems functioning (e.g., dispersion, pollination, and plant reproduction) and are important indicators of landscape conditions (Michel et al., 2020), so they are often used by scientists, decision makers, and non-governmental organizations to highlight and promote conservation policies and needs (e.g. Devenish et al., 2009). In addition, NSDFs have also been the target of other studies about the impact of GCC (Prieto-Torres et al., 2020) and agricultural practices (Ríos-Muñoz and Navarro-Sigüenza, 2009; Vázquez-Reyes et al., 2017). However, the question of whether the current network of PAs in NSDFs is sufficient to conserve bird species under these two threats and, if not, where future conservation priorities should be placed (in addition to current recommendations; Prieto-Torres et al., 2018), remains to be answered. Moreover, delineating areas that are important for bird conservation efforts provides benefits for other taxa within the habitat (Roberge and Angelstam, 2004; Larsen et al., 2012).

The aims of this paper were therefore: (a) to assess potential changes between the present and the year 2050 in the representativeness of the existing PA system due to the individual and synergistic effects of GCC and regional land-use change on the distribution of NSDFs avifauna; and (b) to determine long-term and highly resilient priority conservation areas across NSDFs to complement the current PA network. With this information, we expect to provide more accurate information to design PA networks towards the future with balance goals for biodiversity that are resilient in the future. This is an important step that can guide to the decision-making processes (e.g. economic investment for conservation and management policies) for an effective long-term conservation strategy across this highly threatened ecosystem.

Section snippets

Study area

We defined NSDFs as an ecosystem typically dominated (>50%) by deciduous trees, present in frost-free areas with mean annual temperature >25 °C and total annual precipitation of 700–2000 mm, with at least three dry months (precipitation <100 mm) per year (see Sánchez-Azofeifa et al., 2005; Portillo-Quintero and Sánchez-Azofeifa, 2010; Banda et al., 2016). These forests are discontinuously distributed from northwestern Mexico to northern Argentina and southwestern Brazil, encompassing a complex

Species distribution models and current spatial diversity patterns

The models predicting the potential geographic distribution of each species based on environmental variables adequately defined the ecological niche boundaries, as indicated by performance values that were statistically better than random expectations (Appendix 1). Species distribution models showed spatial distributions ranging from approximately 14 km2 to 132,116 km2 within the NSDFs, which represented, on average, 52.8% of the species' distributions. With respect to the overlap between

Discussion

Land-use and GCC lead to dramatic rearrangements of NSDFs avifauna, including higher extinction risks (as suggested by Vázquez-Reyes et al., 2017; Prieto-Torres et al., 2020) due largely to the fact that only a small part of their distribution would persist under future scenarios. This reinforces the idea that both deforestation and GCC are major threats to NSDFs biodiversity (Miles et al., 2006; Banda et al., 2016; Prieto-Torres et al., 2016, Prieto-Torres et al., 2020; Escribano-Avila et al.,

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials. Interested readers to other material could to request them from the corresponding author [DAP-T].

CRediT authorship contribution statement

DAP-T and ORS conceived the idea for this study. DAP-T and AGNS did the data compilation and provided the species distribution models. DAP-T and JN performed the conservation priority analyses. DAP-T led the writing of the manuscript, with substantial contributions from all authors.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the efforts of museums (see Appendix 5) that provided the databases for this study. The compilation of species' occurrence data and model building used in this study was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship to DAP-T funded by DGAPA–UNAM. The Rufford Foundation (DAP-T 16017-1; DAP-T 20284-2; 28502b), Idea Wild (DAP-T), CONACyT project 152060 (AGNS), and CONABIO project JM071 (AGNS) provided financial and logistical support for this project. Alejandro Gordillo and Daniela M.

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