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Medición del Aislamiento de Áreas Protegidas y Correlaciones del Aislamiento con la Intensidad de Uso del Suelo y el Estatus de Protección
Author(s) -
SEIFERLING IAN S.,
PROULX RAPHAËL,
PERESNETO PEDRO R.,
FAHRIG LENORE,
MESSIER CHRISTIAN
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
conservation biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.2
H-Index - 222
eISSN - 1523-1739
pISSN - 0888-8892
DOI - 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2011.01674.x
Subject(s) - vegetation (pathology) , land cover , vegetation cover , normalized difference vegetation index , geography , protected area , physical geography , environmental science , isolation (microbiology) , cover (algebra) , ecology , land use , environmental resource management , biology , climate change , medicine , mechanical engineering , engineering , pathology , microbiology and biotechnology
Protected areas cover over 12% of the terrestrial surface of Earth, and yet many fail to protect species and ecological processes as originally envisioned. Results of recent studies suggest that a critical reason for this failure is an increasing contrast between the protected lands and the surrounding matrix of often highly altered land cover. We measured the isolation of 114 protected areas distributed worldwide by comparing vegetation‐cover heterogeneity inside protected areas with heterogeneity outside the protected areas. We quantified heterogeneity as the contagion of greenness on the basis of NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) values, for which a higher value of contagion indicates less heterogeneous land cover. We then measured isolation as the difference between mean contagion inside the protected area and mean contagion in 3 buffer areas of increasing distance from the protected‐area border. The isolation of protected areas was significantly positive in 110 of the 114 areas, indicating that vegetation cover was consistently more heterogeneous 10–20 km outside protected areas than inside their borders. Unlike previous researchers, we found that protected areas in which low levels of human activity are allowed were more isolated than areas in which high levels are allowed. Our method is a novel way to assess the isolation of protected areas in different environmental contexts and regions.