Protected area
Protected areas or conservation areas are locations which receive protection because of their recognized natural, ecological or cultural values. There are several kinds of protected areas, which vary by level of protection depending on the enabling laws of each country or the regulations of the international organizations involved; the term "protected area" includes Marine Protected Areas, the boundaries of which will include some area of ocean, Transboundary Protected Areas that overlap multiple countries which remove the borders inside the area for conservation and economic purposes. There are over 161,000 protected areas in the world with more added daily, representing between 10 and 15 percent of the world's land surface area. By contrast, only 1.17% of the world's oceans is included in the world's ~6,800 Marine Protected Areas. Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation providing habitat and protection from hunting for threatened and endangered species. Protection helps maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes.
Protected areas are understood to be those in which human occupation or at least the exploitation of resources is limited. The definition, accepted across regional and global frameworks has been provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in its categorisation guidelines for protected areas; the definition is as follows: A defined geographical space, recognized and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. The objective of protected areas is to conserve biodiversity and to provide a way for measuring the progress of such conservation. Protected areas will encompass several other zones that have been deemed important for particular conservation uses, such as Important Bird Areas and Endemic Bird Areas, Centres of Plant Diversity and Community Conserved Areas, Alliance for Zero Extinction Sites and Key Biodiversity Areas among others. A protected area or an entire network of protected areas may lie within a larger geographic zone, recognised as a terrestrial or marine ecoregions, or a crisis ecoregions for example.
As a result, Protected Areas can encompass a broad range of governance types. Indeed, governance of protected areas has emerged a critical factor in their success. Subsequently, the range of natural resources that any one protected area may guard is vast. Many will be allocated for species conservation whether it be flora or fauna or the relationship between them, but protected areas are important for conserving sites of cultural importance and considerable reserves of natural resources such as. Of all global terrestrial carbon stock, 15.2% is contained within protected areas. Protected areas in South America hold 27% of the world's carbon stock, the highest percentage of any country in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the total stock. Rainforests: 18.8% of the world's forest is covered by protected areas and sixteen of the twenty forest types have 10% or more protected area coverage. Of the 670 ecoregions with forest cover, 54% have 10% or more of their forest cover protected under IUCN Categories I – VI.
Mountains: Nationally designated protected areas cover 14.3% of the world's mountain areas, these mountainous protected areas made up 32.5% of the world's total terrestrial protected area coverage in 2009. Mountain protected area coverage has increased globally by 21% since 1990 and out of the 198 countries with mountain areas, 43.9% still have less than 10% of their mountain areas protected. Annual updates on each of these analyses are made in order to make comparisons to the Millennium Development Goals and several other fields of analysis are expected to be introduced in the monitoring of protected areas management effectiveness, such as freshwater and marine or coastal studies which are underway, islands and drylands which are in planning. Through its World Commission on Protected Areas, the IUCN has developed six Protected Area Management Categories that define protected areas according to their management objectives, which are internationally recognised by various national governments and the United Nations.
The categories provide international standards for defining protected areas and encourage conservation planning according to their management aims. IUCN Protected Area Management Categories: Category Ia — Strict Nature Reserve Category Ib — Wilderness Area Category II — National Park Category III — Natural Monument or Feature Category IV — Habitat/Species Management Area Category V — Protected Landscape/Seascape Category VI – Protected Area with sustainable use of natural resources Protected areas are cultural artifacts, their story is entwined with that of human civilization. Protecting places and resources is by no means a modern concept, whether it be indigenous communities guarding sacred sites or the convention of European hunting reserves. Over 2000 years ago, royal decrees in India protected certain areas. In Europe and powerful people protected hunting grounds for a thousand years. Moreover, the idea of protection of special places is universal: for example, it occurs among the communities in the Pacific and in parts of Africa.
The oldest le
Ecology
Ecology is the branch of biology which studies the interactions among organisms and their environment. Objects of study include interactions of organisms that include biotic and abiotic components of their environment. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, the non-living components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, nutrient cycling, niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment; these processes are sustained by organisms with specific life history traits. Biodiversity means the varieties of species and ecosystems, enhances certain ecosystem services. Ecology is not synonymous with natural history, or environmental science, it overlaps with the related sciences of evolutionary biology and ethology. An important focus for ecologists is to improve the understanding of how biodiversity affects ecological function.
Ecologists seek to explain: Life processes and adaptations The movement of materials and energy through living communities The successional development of ecosystems The abundance and distribution of organisms and biodiversity in the context of the environment. Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management, city planning, community health, economics and applied science, human social interaction. For example, the Circles of Sustainability approach treats ecology as more than the environment'out there', it is not treated as separate from humans. Organisms and resources compose ecosystems which, in turn, maintain biophysical feedback mechanisms that moderate processes acting on living and non-living components of the planet. Ecosystems sustain life-supporting functions and produce natural capital like biomass production, the regulation of climate, global biogeochemical cycles, water filtration, soil formation, erosion control, flood protection, many other natural features of scientific, economic, or intrinsic value.
The word "ecology" was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel. Ecological thought is derivative of established currents in philosophy from ethics and politics. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Hippocrates and Aristotle laid the foundations of ecology in their studies on natural history. Modern ecology became a much more rigorous science in the late 19th century. Evolutionary concepts relating to adaptation and natural selection became the cornerstones of modern ecological theory; the scope of ecology contains a wide array of interacting levels of organization spanning micro-level to a planetary scale phenomena. Ecosystems, for example, contain interacting life forms. Ecosystems are dynamic, they do not always follow a linear successional path, but they are always changing and sometimes so that it can take thousands of years for ecological processes to bring about certain successional stages of a forest. An ecosystem's area can vary from tiny to vast. A single tree is of little consequence to the classification of a forest ecosystem, but critically relevant to organisms living in and on it.
Several generations of an aphid population can exist over the lifespan of a single leaf. Each of those aphids, in turn, support diverse bacterial communities; the nature of connections in ecological communities cannot be explained by knowing the details of each species in isolation, because the emergent pattern is neither revealed nor predicted until the ecosystem is studied as an integrated whole. Some ecological principles, however, do exhibit collective properties where the sum of the components explain the properties of the whole, such as birth rates of a population being equal to the sum of individual births over a designated time frame; the main subdisciplines of ecology, population ecology and ecosystem ecology, exhibit a difference not only of scale, but of two contrasting paradigms in the field. The former focus on organisms distribution and abundance, while the focus on materials and energy fluxes; the scale of ecological dynamics can operate like a closed system, such as aphids migrating on a single tree, while at the same time remain open with regard to broader scale influences, such as atmosphere or climate.
Hence, ecologists classify ecosystems hierarchically by analyzing data collected from finer scale units, such as vegetation associations and soil types, integrate this information to identify emergent patterns of uniform organization and processes that operate on local to regional and chronological scales. To structure the study of ecology into a conceptually manageable framework, the biological world is organized into a nested hierarchy, ranging in scale from genes, to cells, to tissues, to organs, to organisms, to species, to populations, to communities, to ecosystems, to biomes, up to the level of the biosphere; this framework exhibits non-linear behaviors.
IUCN Red List
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, founded in 1965, has evolved to become the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. It uses a set of criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of subspecies; these criteria are relevant to all species and all regions of the world, With its strong scientific base, the IUCN Red List is recognized as the most authoritative guide to the status of biological diversity. A series of Regional Red List are produced by countries or organizations, which assess the risk of extinction to species within a political management unit; the IUCN Red List is set upon precise criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species and subspecies. These criteria are relevant to all regions of the world; the aim is to convey the urgency of conservation issues to the public and policy makers, as well as help the international community to try to reduce species extinction. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the formally stated goals of the Red List are to provide scientifically based information on the status of species and subspecies at a global level, to draw attention to the magnitude and importance of threatened biodiversity, to influence national and international policy and decision-making, to provide information to guide actions to conserve biological diversity.
Major species assessors include BirdLife International, the Institute of Zoology, the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, many Specialist Groups within the IUCN Species Survival Commission. Collectively, assessments by these organizations and groups account for nearly half the species on the Red List; the IUCN aims to have the category of every species re-evaluated every five years if possible, or at least every ten years. This is done in a peer reviewed manner through IUCN Species Survival Commission Specialist Groups, which are Red List Authorities responsible for a species, group of species or specific geographic area, or in the case of BirdLife International, an entire class; as of 2018, 26,197 species are now classified critical or endangered. The 1964 IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants used the older pre-criteria Red List assessment system. Plants listed may not, appear in the current Red List. IUCN advise that it is best to check both the online Red List and the 1997 plants Red List publication.
The 2006 Red List, released on 4 May 2006 evaluated 40,168 species as a whole, plus an additional 2,160 subspecies, aquatic stocks, subpopulations. On 12 September 2007, the World Conservation Union released the 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. In this release, they have raised their classification of both the western lowland gorilla and the Cross River gorilla from endangered to critically endangered, the last category before extinct in the wild, due to Ebola virus and poaching, along with other factors. Russ Mittermeier, chief of Swiss-based IUCN's Primate Specialist Group, stated that 16,306 species are endangered with extinction, 188 more than in 2006; the Red List includes the Sumatran orangutan in the Critically Endangered category and the Bornean orangutan in the Endangered category. The 2008 Red List was released on 6 October 2008, at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, "has confirmed an extinction crisis, with one in four at risk of disappearing forever"; the study shows at least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction, 836 are listed as Data Deficient.
The Red List of 2012 was released 19 July 2012 at Rio+20 Earth Summit. The IUCN assessed a total of 63,837 species. 3,947 were described as "critically endangered" and 5,766 as "endangered," while more than 10,000 species are listed as "vulnerable." At threat are 41% of amphibian species, 33% of reef-building corals, 30% of conifers, 25% of mammals, 13% of birds. The IUCN Red List has listed 132 species of plants and animals from India as "Critically Endangered." Species are classified by the IUCN Red List into nine groups, specified through criteria such as rate of decline, population size, area of geographic distribution, degree of population and distribution fragmentation. There is an emphasis on the acceptability of applying any criteria in the absence of high quality data including suspicion and potential future threats, "so long as these can reasonably be supported." Extinct – beyond reasonable doubt that the species is no longer extant. Extinct in the wild – survives only in captivity, cultivation and/or outside native range, as presumed after exhaustive surveys.
Critically endangered – in a and critical state. Endangered – high risk of extinction in the wild, meets any of criteria A to E for Endangered. Vulnerable – meets one of the 5 red list criteria and thus considered to be at high risk of unnatural extinction without further human intervention. Near threatened – close to being at high risk of extinction in the near future. Least concern – unlikely to become extinct in the near future. Data deficient Not evaluated In the IUCN Red List, "threatened" embraces the categories of Critically Endangered and Vulnerable; the older 1994 list has only a single "Lower Risk" category which contained three subcategories: Conservation Depe
Frank Lake (Alberta)
Frank Lake is a restored wetland located 6 km east of High River, Alberta, 50 km south of Calgary, about 2 km south of Blackie. The lake is controlled by Ducks Unlimited Canada for wildlife management purposes, is an Important Bird Area, it is one of four Alberta lakes with the same name. The lake has had a history of years of being dry, years of being flooded; the main goal of managing Frank Lake is to ensure that the lake is a permanent water body, which will improve wildlife habitat. Water control measures have been implemented to help ensure. Measures include the building of dikes and water control structures as well as the building of a pipeline from High River to channel treated effluent from the town of High River and a local food processing plant. Water quality is monitored. Nesting boxes, nesting platforms, rock islands are among the structures placed around the lake to encourage nesting and improve habitat; the Important Bird Areas program considers Frank Lake to be the most important wetland in southwestern Alberta for the production of waterfowl and other water birds.
Frank Lake is located in the foothills fescue prairie ecoregion. The lake is a hemi-marsh, which means it has the same area of open water as there is emergent vegetation. Vegetation includes hardstem bulrush, sago pondweed, Richardson's pondweed, northern watermilfoil; the lake and its surrounding upland areas attracts many species of birds. Waterfowl and shorebirds and other birds use the lake for staging during migration, nesting; some birds that can be seen here include: tundra swan, trumpeter swan, Canada goose, northern pintail, Franklin's gull, ring-billed gull, California gull, common tern, short-eared owl, eared grebe, marbled godwit, long-billed dowitcher, long-billed curlew, white-faced ibis, black-crowned night-heron, black-necked stilt. Birdwatching is a popular activity. Survey reports from 1883 referred to Frank Lake as "a large lake", but early settlers in the area referred to the lake as Begg Lake, Green Lake, Windsor Lake, it was named after Bishop Christopher Frank who established a nearby Mormon settlement known as Frankburg.
The lake has always been used by hunters. In the early days, hunted waterfowl was shipped by the railway carload to the United States. Muskrats were trapped. Feedlots became established in the area, a feedlot known as a beef camp was set up on "the point" on the east side of Frank Lake; the cattle from the camp were exported to Britain. The lake was very full or dry. In the early 1900s there was so much water; the lake dried out in the 1930s, 1940s, the 1980s. In 1945 the lake was described as "a flat area of alkali dust". Flooding occurred in the mid 1970s. Severe flooding in 1952 prompted Ducks Unlimited to construct a drainage ditch. Further work to stabilize the water level in the lake began in 1975 when a weir was constructed on the lake’s south end; the lake, dried up in the 1980s. To help ensure a long-term water supply, a pipeline was built to bring treated waste water from High River and the nearby Cargill meat packing plant. During World War II an area in the middle of the dry lake bed was used as a relief landing field for RCAF Station High River Welcoming Back Wildlife-Frank Lake Conservation Area, home to some of the most important wetlands in southwestern Alberta, is an amazing story of rejuvenation Retrieved August 7, 2017 Nature Calgary - Frank Lake Retrieved April 29, 2012 Important Bird Areas in Canada - Frank Lake Retrieved April 29, 2012 Government of Alberta - An Overview of Water Quality in Frank Lake 1990-1993 Retrieved July 7, 2018 ResearchGate: Frank Lake Retrieved August 7, 2017 Fencelines and Furrows Historical Book Society.
Fencelines and Furrows. First Edition, 1969. No ISBN. Retrieved July 11, 2018 Frank Lake Retrieved July 16, 2018 Restoration of a Canadian Prairie Wetland with Agricultural and Municipal Wastewater ebird Canada - Bird Observations, Frank Lake
Biodiversity hotspot
A biodiversity hotspot is a biogeographic region with significant levels of biodiversity, threatened with humans. Norman Myers wrote about the concept in two articles in “The Environmentalist”, 1990 revised after thorough analysis by Myers and others “Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions” and a paper published in the journal Nature. To qualify as a biodiversity hotspot on Myers 2000 edition of the hotspot-map, a region must meet two strict criteria: it must contain at least 0.5% or 1,500 species of vascular plants as endemics, it has to have lost at least 70% of its primary vegetation. Around the world, 36 areas qualify under this definition; these sites support nearly 60% of the world's plant, mammal and amphibian species, with a high share of those species as endemics. Some of these hotspots support up to 15,000 endemic plant species and some have lost up to 95% of their natural habitat. Biodiversity hotspots host their diverse ecosystems on just 2.3% of the planet's surface, the area defined as hotspots covers a much larger proportion of the land.
The original 25 hotspots covered 11.8% of the land surface area of the Earth. Overall, the current hotspots cover more than 16% of the land surface area, but have lost around 85% of their habitat; this loss of habitat explains why 60% of the world's terrestrial life lives on only 2.3% of the land surface area. Only a small percentage of the total land area within biodiversity hotspots is now protected. Several international organizations are working in many ways to conserve biodiversity hotspots. Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund is a global program that provides funding and technical assistance to nongovernmental organizations and participation to protect the Earth's richest regions of plant and animal diversity including: biodiversity hotspots, high-biodiversity wilderness areas and important marine regions; the World Wide Fund for Nature has derived a system called the "Global 200 Ecoregions", the aim of, to select priority Ecoregions for conservation within each of 14 terrestrial, 3 freshwater, 4 marine habitat types.
They are chosen for their species richness, taxonomic uniqueness, unusual ecological or evolutionary phenomena, global rarity. All biodiversity hotspots contain at least one Global 200 Ecoregion. Birdlife International has identified 218 “Endemic Bird Areas” each of which hold two or more bird species found nowhere else. Birdlife International has identified more than 11,000 Important Bird Areas all over the world. Plant life International coordinates several the world aiming to identify Important Plant Areas. Alliance for Zero Extinction is an initiative of a large number of scientific organizations and conservation groups who co-operate to focus on the most threatened endemic species of the world, they have identified 595 sites, including a large number of Birdlife’ s Important Bird Areas. The National Geographic Society has prepared a world map of the hotspots and ArcView shapefile and metadata for the Biodiversity Hotspots including details of the individual endangered fauna in each hotspot, available from Conservation International.
By the influence of that the central government of india arrived a new authority named CAMPA to control the destruction of forests and biological spots in india North and Central America California Floristic Province •8• Madrean pine-oak woodlands •26• Mesoamerica •2• North American Coastal Plain •36•The Caribbean Caribbean Islands •3•South America Atlantic Forest •4• Cerrado •6• Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests •7• Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena •5• Tropical Andes •1•Europe Mediterranean Basin •14•Africa Cape Floristic Region •12• Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa •10• Eastern Afromontane •28• Guinean Forests of West Africa •11• Horn of Africa •29• Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands •9• Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany •27• Succulent Karoo •13•Central Asia Mountains of Central Asia •31•South Asia Eastern Himalaya, India •32• Indo-Burma and Myanmar •19• Western Ghats and Sri Lanka •21•South East Asia and Asia-Pacific East Melanesian Islands •34• New Caledonia •23• New Zealand •24• Philippines •18• Polynesia-Micronesia •25• Eastern Australian temperate forests •35• Southwest Australia •22• Sundaland and Nicobar islands of India •16• Wallacea •17•East Asia Japan •33• Mountains of Southwest China •20•West Asia Caucasus •15• Irano-Anatolian •30•Critiques of "Hotspots" The high profile of the biodiversity hotspots approach has resulted in some criticism.
Papers such as Kareiva & Marvier have argued that the biodiversity hotspots: Do not adequately represent other forms of species richness. Do not adequately represent taxa other than vascular plants. Do not protect smaller scale richness hotspots. Do not make allowances for changing land use patterns. Hotspots represent regions that have experienced considerable habitat loss, but this does not mean they are experiencing ongoing habitat loss. On the other hand, regions that are intact have experienced little land loss, but are losing habitat at tremendous rates. Do not protect ecosystem services. Do not consider phylogenetic diversity. A recent series of papers has pointed out that biodiversity hotspots do not address the concept of cost; the purpose of biodiversity hotspots is not to identify regions that are of high biodiversity value, but to prioritize conservation spending. The regions identified include some in the developed world, alongside others in the developing wo
