Spatial dynamics of territories and biodiversity for conservation

Cécile Albert
Institut Méditerranéen de Biodiversité et d’Ecologie Marine et Continentale, Aix-Marseille Université, France

cecile.albert -at- imbe.fr

The loss and fragmentation of natural habitats is a major threat to biodiversity. Faced with this threat, spatial planning for conservation and human activities is a major challenge. But planning is often synonymous with freezing, though territories and biodiversity are not static. It is therefore crucial to take into account the spatial dynamics of territories and the spatial dynamics of biodiversity in land planning in order to reconcile planning and conservation, which is still too little done (Schiesari et al. 2018).

On the one hand, conservation operates in a changing world, whether in terms of territorial dynamics and land use changes, or in terms of adaptation (of people and biodiversity) to climate change. A dynamic approach, based on scenarios of possible territorial evolution, makes it possible to place conservation issues in time and space, in particular by combining these scenarios with modelling and spatial prioritization (Doxa et al. 2017; Albert et al. 2017).

On the other hand, conservation operates for a changing biodiversity. However, the links between the ecology of movement and the conservation of connectivity remain tenuous. In particular, the role of landscape matrix and its resistance to the movement of organisms remains poorly understood (Martin-Queller et al. 2017; Brudvig et al. 2017). But also the transition from understanding the movement of an individual in a landscape to understanding potential flows between habitat areas remains difficult; this makes conservation approaches based on graph theory only unproven assumptions. 

Finally, while the articulation of territorial and biodiversity dynamics for conservation remains a research question, it also raises many questions about possible applications. Transferring our knowledge and the associated uncertainties to managers is a priority.

Recent publications:

1 Albert CH, Rayfield B., Dumitru M. & Gonzalez A. (2017) Applying network theory to prioritize multi-species habitat networks that are robust to climate and land-use change. Conservation Biology, 31 (6), 1383–1396

2 Brudvig LA, Leroux SJ, Albert CH, Bruna EM, Davies KF, Ewers RM, Levey DJ, Pardini R & Resasco J (2017) Evaluating conceptual models of landscape change. Ecography, ’Fragmentation Special Issue’, 40 (1), 74-84

3 Doxa A, Albert CH, Leriche A & A Saatkamp (2017) Prioritizing areas for the conservation of coastal biodiversity under high urbanization pressure, Journal of Environmental Management, 201, 425-434

4 Martín Queller E, Albert CH, Dumas P-J & A Saatkamp (2017) Islands, mainland and terrestrial fragments: how does isolation shape plant diversity? Ecology & Evolution, 7 (17), 6904–6917

5 Schiesari L. et al. (2018) The why, when and how of applied metaecology; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/422501