Sponsor
This work was funded by Fondo Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, FONDECYT-CONICYT Chile (Proyecto FONDECYT Iniciación N°11110271).
Published In
PLoS ONE
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-5-2016
Subjects
Conservation of natural resources -- Management, Landscape protection, Protected areas -- Management, Forest degradation -- Control
Abstract
Most evaluations of the effectiveness of PAs have relied on indirect estimates based on comparisons between protected and unprotected areas. Such methods can be biased when protection is not randomly assigned. We add to the growing literature on the impact of PAs by answering the following research questions: What is the impact of Chilean PAs on deforestation which occurred between 1986 and 2011? How do estimates of the impact of PAs vary when using only public land as control units? We show that the characteristics of the areas in which protected and unprotected lands are located differ significantly. To satisfactorily estimate the effects of PAs, we use matching methods to define adequate control groups, but not as in previous research.We construct control groups using separately nonprotected private areas and non-protected public lands.We find that PAs avoid deforestation when using unprotected private lands as valid controls, however results show no impact when the control group is based only on unprotected public land. Different land management regimes, and higher levels of enforcement inside public lands may reduce the opportunity to add additional conservation benefits when the national systems for PAs are based on the protection of previously unprotected public lands. Given that not all PAs are established to avoid deforestation, results also admit the potential for future studies to include other outcomes including forest degradation (not just deforestation), biodiversity, wildlife, primary forests (not forests in general), among others.
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0148094
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/28497
Citation Details
Arriagada RA, Echeverria CM, Moya DE (2016) Creating Protected Areas on Public Lands: Is There Room for Additional Conservation? PLoS ONE 11(2): e0148094. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0148094
Description
Copyright: © 2016 Arriagada et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.