Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
Commun Biol. 2024 Sep 19;7(1):1177. doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06510-0.
Initiatives to protect 30% of Earth by 2030 prompt evaluation of how to efficiently target shortcomings in the global protected area (PA) network. Focusing on amphibians, the most vulnerable vertebrate class, we illustrate the conservation value of microreserves, a term we employ here to refer to reserves of <10 km. We report that the network continues to under-represent threatened amphibians and that, despite this clear shortcoming in land-based conservation, the creation of PAs protecting amphibians slowed after 2010. By proving something previously assumed-that amphibians generally have smaller ranges than other terrestrial vertebrates-we demonstrate that microreserves could protect a substantial portion of many amphibian ranges, particularly threatened species. We find existing microreserves are capable of hosting an amphibian species richness similar to PAs 1000-10,00X larger, and we show that amphibians' high beta diversity means that microreserves added to a growing PA network cover amphibian species 1.5-6x faster than larger size categories. We propose that stemming global biodiversity loss requires that we seriously consider the conservation potential of microreserves, using them to capture small-range endemics that may otherwise be omitted from the PA network entirely.
到 2030 年保护地球 30%的倡议促使人们评估如何有效地解决全球保护区 (PA) 网络中的不足之处。我们专注于两栖动物，这一最脆弱的脊椎动物类群，阐明了微观保护区的保护价值，我们在这里使用这个术语来指代面积小于 10 公里的保护区。研究报告指出，该网络继续未能充分保护受到威胁的两栖动物，尽管在陆地上的保护存在这一明显的缺陷，但自 2010 年以来，保护两栖动物的保护区的创建速度有所放缓。通过证明我们之前的假设——两栖动物的分布范围通常比其他陆地脊椎动物小——我们表明微观保护区可以保护许多两栖动物分布范围的很大一部分，尤其是受到威胁的物种。我们发现现有的微观保护区有能力容纳与 1000-10000 倍大的保护区相似的两栖动物物种丰富度，并且表明两栖动物的高β多样性意味着，随着保护区网络的不断扩大，微观保护区覆盖的两栖动物物种的速度比更大的保护区类别快 1.5-6 倍。我们提出，遏制全球生物多样性的丧失需要我们认真考虑微观保护区的保护潜力，利用它们来保护那些可能完全被保护区网络遗漏的小范围特有物种。
