Effectiveness Assessment Of Protected Areas And Priority Protection Strategies For Tropical East Africa

Protected areas(PAs)are important barriers for biodiversity conservation,and play an important role in promoting biodiversity conservation,preventing biological extinction and habitat loss.The evaluation and optimization of the protection effectiveness of PAs has always been an important part of biodiversity conservation,but the methods of evaluation of the protection effectiveness and the delimitation of priority protection areas are not perfect.Objective Taking the PAs in Tropical East Africa(TEA)as an example,this study intends to conduct a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the reserve,build an evaluation model for the protection effectiveness of the reserve,provide guidance for the protection of regional planning,improve the protection effectiveness of the reserve in response to interference,strengthen the attention to unprotected species or ecological areas,and then promote the effective protection of biodiversity.Methods This study quantitatively analyzes the protection effectiveness of PAs through three levels of management effectiveness,the vulnerability of threatened species and the risk of responding to global change,and determines the priority protection areas respectively through quantitative analysis and spatial overlap.Among them,the evaluation of the management effectiveness of PAs includes three factors: the management department,the protection target and the IUCN management category;The effectiveness assessment of threatened species protection includes threatened plants and animals;The risk assesment of responding to global change includes climate change and human interference.Results There are 1709 PAs,accounting for 28.86%of the land area,but there are spatial overlaps in PAs.The areas with high management effectiveness of PAs are mainly concentrated in the south,southwest and central parts of TEA;Among the threatened species,12.80% of amphibians,27.85% of reptiles,36.35% of birds,36.23% of mammals,35.23% of woody plants and 35.15% of herbaceous plants are not in the reserve;In the analysis of the risk of responding to global change,about 17.12% of TEA region will be affected by precipitation reduction,39.91% by substantial changes in temperature and more than half of the region will be affected by human interference;The protection priority Ⅰand priority Ⅱ are determined by quantitative analysis and spatial superposition which can play a complementary role.These priority protection areas are mainly distributed in the north-central,west,southwest and eastern coastal areas of TEA.Conclusion The evaluation of the effectiveness of PAs in TEA is mainly accessed through three indicator systems,the effectiveness of comprehensive reserve management,the vulnerability of threatened species and the response to global change risks.It pointed out the current protection gaps,and proposed the methods for evaluating the protection effectiveness of PAs and determining protection priority.This study not only promotes the improvement of the effectiveness of the PAs and provision for a basis for the priority protection strategy in TEA,but also provides reference value for the global biodiversity protection.