THE PROJECT
CONTEXT
Biodiversity conservation is a crisis discipline: it operates to reverse the effects of intense threats acting over biodiversity; it conflicts with dominant and competing socioeconomic activities, and; it typically runs under tight budgets. Additionally, such ecological and socioeconomic environments are tailored by dynamic processes turning conservation decisions complex. In order to mitigate such conflicts and to provide conceptually-sound and efficient decisions analytical support-tools, capable of integrating such complexities in optimized frameworks, are needed.
Every year, large investments are made in biodiversity conservation by governments, NGOs, and private sector. In order to achieve the CBD's conservation targets for 2020 (Aichi targets) these investments need to substantially increase but, given the current global funding crisis, the available resources should be carefully distributed in space and time, using a clear prioritization program. Therefore, novel conservation policies should:
1) be strategic and produce the greatest possible benefit for the money invested;
2) minimize conflicts with established socioeconomic activities in order to gain effectiveness and tackle social engagement, and;
3) accommodate the pervasive impacts of global threats and processes, like climate change.
Central to the credibility of such policies, conservation spending need to be demonstrably efficient, transparent and accountable thus reinforcing the importance of systematic decision protocols and support tools to solve such non-trivial problems.
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AIMS
Climate change impacts the geography of species and therefore intervenes with standard, static-based conservation practices that protected for perpetuity areas to abate the impacts of (local) threats to biodiversity. However, global stressors and strong human development call conservation planning to:
1) entangle dynamism and adaptiveness;
2) reduce as possible focal area and socioeconomic conflicts, and;
3) act at wider spatial and temporal scales, in order to match the scale of global threats and to retrieve the best conservation outcomes with the least amount of investment. RECONCILE is analyzing European vertebrate and plant species using agreed storylines for climate and land use changes up to 2099.
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Problems such as:
1) Where and when to prioritize conservation actions to abate climate change impacts over species distributions?
2) How to optimally integrate cooperation opportunities between countries in order to establish effective cross-border climate-change-concerned conservation plans?
3) What are the impacts of distinct socioeconomic activities upon effectiveness and efficiency of climate-change-concerned conservation plans?
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​METHODS
RECONCILE is established to respond to a critical gap in spatial conservation prioritization: the lack of a tool capable to address distinct climate change-focused conservation challenges, skillful to identify spatio-temporal coherent conservation-units (climate-change-concerned conservation corridors, C5). This is a present-day concern very hard to tackle given its intrinsic complex nature. However if conveniently solvable it can booster conservation effectiveness (ie. reducing extinction risk), while lessening financial investments and socioeconomic conflicts.
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RECONCILE is developing such a concept within a hand-on software (iC5 - identification of climate-change-concerned conservation corridors). The project will fed on advances coming from a previous EUFP7 project in where software development was initiated (Alagador et al. 2016). This tool will be improved, its conceptual scope extended and algorithmic power enforced in order to think up optimized spatial conservation plans at wider spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales.
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Data on predicted future climate, species ranges, species dispersal, land uses and other relevant socio-economic proxies are central to the success of the project. RECONCILE will base much of its work on data from a previous study (Araújo, Alagador et al, 2009).
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