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Conservation strategies aiming to safeguard species genetic diversity in the Cerrado are urgent. The biome is an agriculture frontier and lost at least 50% of its natural capital since the early 1950s, with the highest rate of vegetation clearing among all Brazilian biomes. Here we match information on geographic range shifts in response to climate changes and habitat loss to define conservation priorities for species genetic diversity using Eugenia dysenterica, a widely distributed tree across the Brazilian Cerrado. We found a set of 27 optimal solutions in which a minimum of 12 out of 23 populations are necessary to represent all 208 alleles of the species. Environmental suitability predicted for 2050 was higher for populations in the southern region of the Cerrado, whereas the proportion of natural remnants around populations expected for 2030 was lower in this same region. Thus, it seems to be more conservative to adopt "in situ" strategies in the northwestern part of the species range to hold more genetic diversity in areas harboring high numbers of natural remnants, despite the likely reduction in climatic suitability. On the other hand, in the southern and southeastern region of the range, despite more stability from a climatic point of view, there was a serious constraint given the high levels of human occupation; in this case, "ex situ" strategies might be a better option for the species. Our results and proposed priorities enable different strategies for making an operational approach for conservation of genetic diversity. Adopting different prioritization strategies for stable and unstable regions (both in climatic suitability and natural remnants) in the future would allow, in principle, to avoid "the worst of both worlds" to achieve an efficient conservation program for the species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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China is facing an unprecedented set of challenges in balancing the effects of economic development and global climate change with environmental protection and maintaining biodiversity. Although positive steps have been undertaken to remedy this situation, currently 80% of China’s 25 extant primate species are threatened, 15-18 species have population sizes of less than 3000 individuals, and two species of gibbons and one species of langur have been extirpated over the past few decades. Today, virtually all species of primates in China inhabit fragmented landscapes and are distributed in small isolated subpopulations with limited opportunities to exchange individuals or genetic information. Here we present a historical framework examining how human-induced environmental changes, particularly since the second half of the 20th century, accelerated primate population decline in China. In addition, we modeled the expected spatial conflict between agricultural expansion and primate distributions over the next 25-75 years and assessed the current overlap between protected areas and primate distributions. Depending on the assumptions of the spatial conflict model, primate distributions are expected to decline by an additional 51-87% by the year 2100. Thus, unless large-scale conservation policies are implemented immediately the current trend of primate population decline, local extirpation, and species extinctions will accelerate. To mitigate against such extinction scenarios, we advocate the creation of a Chinese national agency and repository of environmental information focused on public awareness and education, the implementation of targeted programs of habitat restoration designed to return impacted forests to a more natural state especially within and at the boundaries of nature reserves, the establishment of additional protect areas, and the construction of a latticework of corridors connecting isolated primate subpopulations. This comprehensive approach offers the most effective way to protect China’s animal and plant biodiversity, including its endangered primate populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite wide evidence of a quickly changing world, systematic conservation planning analyses are usually static assuming that the biodiversity being preserved in sites do not change through time. Here we generated a comprehensive ensemble forecasting experiment for 444 amphibian species inhabiting the Atlantic Forest Biodiversity Hotspot. Models were based on four methods for modeling ecological niches, and three future climate simulations. Combinations of these models were used to estimate species occurrences. We used species occurrences to optimize the current and future representation of amphibians with different conservation targets based on their geographic range size. We compared spatial priority outcomes (variance of site selection frequency scores) under dynamic conditions, using a bi-dimensional plot in which the relative importance of each site in achieving conservation targets was assessed both for current time and to 2050. Projections for 2050 show that species richness pattern will remain approximately constant, whereas high turnover rates are forecasted. Selection frequency of several locations varied widely, with recurrent sites located at the north and southeast of the biome. As for 2050, spatial priorities concentrate in the northern part of the biome. Thirty-three sites have high priority for conservation as they play an important role now and will still stand as priority locations in 2050. We present a conceptual model for dynamic spatial conservation prioritization that helps to identify priority sites under climate change. We also call attention to sites in which risk of investment is high, and to those that may become interesting options in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP) involves a series of steps that should be accomplished to determine the most cost-effective way to invest in conservation action. Although SCP has been usually applied at the species level (or hierarchically higher), it is possible to use alleles from molecular analyses at the population level as basic units for analyses. Here we demonstrate how SCP procedures can be used to establish optimum strategies for in situ and ex situ conservation of a single species, using Dipteryx alata (a Fabaceae tree species widely distributed and endemics to Brazilian Cerrado) as a case study. Data for the analyses consisted in 52 alleles from eight microsatellite loci coded for a total of 644 individual trees sampled in 25 local populations throughout species' geographic range. We found optimal solutions in which seven local populations are the smallest set of local populations of D. alata that should be conserved to represent the known genetic diversity. Combining these several solutions allowed estimating the relative importance of the local populations for conserving all known alleles, taking into account the current land-use patterns in the region. A germplasm collection for this species already exists, so we also used SCP approach to identify the smallest number of populations that should be further collected in the field to complement the existing collection, showing that only four local populations should be sampled for optimizing the species ex situ representation. The initial application of the SCP methods to genetic data showed here can be a useful starting point for methodological and conceptual improvements and may be a first important step towards a comprehensive and balanced quantitative definition of conservation goals, shedding light to new possibilities for in situ and ex situ designs within species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-governmental organizations have proposed nine different global prioritization schemes, some of them focusing on areas with low vulnerability (a proactive reasoning) and some others targeting areas with high vulnerability (a reactive reasoning). The main threat to the remaining natural habitats of these areas is the expansion of agriculture. We evaluated the spatial congruence between agricultural land cover and global conservation priority areas in the present and in the future using a spatial model of land use cover change from 2000 to 2100. We showed that by the year 2000, the extent of agriculture was larger in reactive priority areas than in the rest of the world, while it was smaller in areas highlighted as important under proactive approaches. During the twenty-first century, we found a general increase in agriculture area and the difference between the approaches of conservation schemes is expected to hold true, although we found that high-biodiversity wilderness areas (HBWA), a proactive scheme, may be specially affected in certain scenarios of future change. These results suggest an increase in conservation conflicts over this century. In face of agricultural expansion, both kinds of prioritization approaches are important, but different strategies of protection are necessary (e.g., reactive approaches need the urgent protection of remnant habitats, while proactive ones have space to create megareserves). Further, conservation organizations must include agriculture expansion data and their uncertainty in conservation planning in order to be more successful in biological conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]