title: Complementarity and Area-Efficiency in the Prioritization of the Global Protected Area Network.
abstract: Complementarity and cost-efficiency are widely used principles for protected area network design. Despite the wide use and robust theoretical underpinnings, their effects on the performance and patterns of priority areas are rarely studied in detail. Here we compare two approaches for identifying the management priority areas inside the global protected area network: 1) a scoring-based approach, used in recently published analysis and 2) a spatial prioritization method, which accounts for complementarity and area-efficiency. Using the same IUCN species distribution data the complementarity method found an equal-area set of priority areas with double the mean species ranges covered compared to the scoring-based approach. The complementarity set also had 72% more species with full ranges covered, and lacked any coverage only for half of the species compared to the scoring approach. Protected areas in our complementarity-based solution were on average smaller and geographically more scattered. The large difference between the two solutions highlights the need for critical thinking about the selected prioritization method. According to our analysis, accounting for complementarity and area-efficiency can lead to considerable improvements when setting management priorities for the global protected area network.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kullberg
authors.affiliation: Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Tuuli
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Toivonen
authors.affiliation: Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Montesino Pouzols
authors.affiliation: Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Joona
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lehtomäki
authors.affiliation: Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.|School of Life Sciences, University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.
authors.forename: Enrico
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Di Minin
authors.affiliation: Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Atte
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Moilanen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D056727:Endangered Species / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012984:Software