Dados do Trabalho

TÍTULO

THE EFFICIENCY OF RESERVE NETWORKS BRAZILIAN TO THE CONSERVATION OF MARSUPIALS.

Resumo

The main conservation strategies are to preserve or restore the natural habitats which maintain maximum biodiversity, ecosystem processes and services. Conserve individual species would be a good alternative if resources were not limited. Thus reserve networks are commonly used as a conservation strategy to protect areas with unique habitats and biodiversity. Reserves alone are not adequate for nature conservation, but they are essential to network strategies are implemented. This paper evaluated the effectiveness of the network of nature reserves to represent the species of marsupials in Brazil. We compared if the entire habitat coverage inside the nature reserves relative to its total habitat area was above the Aichi Biodiversity Target and we also create a null model to evaluate the allocation of reserves and compare whether protected area proportion of the species is higher than expected at random. The natural reserve network is useful for some marsupial genera, but others have a low percentage of the distribution protected, moreover twelve species has more than 90% of habitat coverage unprotected. Only with the overlap, the effectiveness of the reserve network in representing all species of Brazilian marsupials was almost 50%. However, with a null model, this number reduced to 35%. Moreover, Seven Brazilian marsupials species have very restricted distributions and, based on other studies, the protection target for these species would be 100%, only two occurs almost entirely within natural reserves, and another five others have a low proportion of protection. The null model is an alternative to evaluate the allocation of natural reserves existing, our results showed that the Brazilian reserve network is useful for some genera of marsupials and not necessarily a residual area. Although six genera have a low degree of protection, two of them have only one representing species (Chironectes and Lutreolina), and all species of genus Didelphis have a broad distribution and are classified as least concern by IUCN. We recommend continued research into the effectiveness and applicability of prioritizations in conservation actions.

Palavras-chave

Conservation areas; Prioritization; Protected areas; Reserve site selection; Mammals.