Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness

Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to help measure the conservation impact of PA management interventions is high. Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence for a link between PAME assessment results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PA management interventions on conservation outcomes. We conclude that PAME data, while designed as a tool for local adaptive management, may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized and mitigated where possible.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

• Publication date

  2015-11-05

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Business, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rstb.2014.0281PMID 26460133PMCID 4614737
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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