Applications and implications of systematic planning for the Pantanal Wetland Biosphere Reserve - Brazil

The concept of Biosphere reserves has never been examined through the eyes ofsystematic conservation planning. Two of the reasons behind this are: the lack of aspecific platform to perform such evaluation explicitly and the lack of knowledge transferto the stakeholders responsible for proposing and evaluating them. Recentdevelopments in conservation planning programming offered tools to perform suchanalysis. I approached the problem using the newly developed Marxan for zoning, whichis an evolution of the widely used conservation planning software Marxan. Using thissoftware I was able to determine, the tradeoffs between concurrent objectives under amulti-stakeholder environment. Furthermore we developed and tested new ideas andtools for systematic conservation planning in an extremely dynamic landscape.In the first chapter, I provided evidence of the inadequacies associated withrepresentation and efficiency of the existing conservation plans in the Pantanal. I thenframed the economic rationale behind the existing threats to the region and how theyrelate to conservation strategies via their impact on land value. The third step wasassociated with the challenges of incorporating ecosystem dynamics into conservation, tosecure long-term adequacy for such reserves. I developed, with my collaborators, amodel capable of simulating flood and succession dynamics into a comprehensive tool forconservation planning, and then implemented the probabilistic approach in Marxandecision support software to maximize persistence in a reliable fashion. My resultspointed to three levels of inadequacies associated with the existing and proposedconservation plans for the Pantanal wetland. First, existing reserves were neithercomprehensive nor representative when trying to secure the persistence of simplebiodiversity surrogates. Second, none of the plans proposed for the Pantanal consideredthe costs involved in the implementation of such conservation plans, therefore also failingto fully explore the principle of efficiency. Finally the existing conservation plansconsidered biodiversity to be static, leading to a predictable failure of such plans in thelong run with respect to addressing the principle of adequacy, the second of the fourCARE principles.I concluded by offering planners a suitable platform to accommodate apparentlyconflicting objectives. We used Marxan with zones to optimize spatial allocation ofplanning units to each of the zones of a revised Pantanal biosphere reserve. I generatedsolutions that, in a spatially explicitly fashion, are able to deliver representation, efficiencyand adequacy, testing the behavior of a series of qualitative and quantitative parameters(i.e. targets and costs) in achieving the objectives of biodiversity, socio-cultural andeconomic sustainability.