the importance of conserving biodiversity outside of protected areas in mediterranean ecosystems保护生物多样性的重要性在地中海生态系统保护区以外的.pdfVIP

The Importance of Conserving Biodiversity Outside of Protected Areas in Mediterranean Ecosystems 1 2 Robin L. Cox *, Emma C. Underwood 1The Nature Conservancy, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 2 Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California Davis, Davis, California, United States of America Abstract Mediterranean-type ecosystems constitute one of the rarest terrestrial biomes and yet they are extraordinarily biodiverse. Home to over 250 million people, the five regions where these ecosystems are found have climate and coastal conditions that make them highly desirable human habitats. The current conservation landscape does not reflect the mediterranean biome’s rarity and its importance for plant endemism. Habitat conversion will clearly outpace expansion of formal protected-area networks, and conservationists must augment this traditional strategy with new approaches to sustain the mediterranean biota. Using regional scale datasets, we determine the area of land in each of the five regions that is protected, converted (e.g., to urban or industrial), impacted (e.g., intensive, cultivated agriculture), or lands that we consider to have conservation potential. The latter are natural and semi-natural lands that are unprotected (e.g., private range lands) but sustain numerous native species and associated habitats. Chile has the greatest proportion of its land (75%) in this category and California-Mexico the least (48%). To illustrate the potential for achieving mediterranean biodiversity conservation on these lands, we use species-area curves generated from ecoregion scale data on native plant species richness and vertebrate species richness. F