How well do the existing and proposed reserve networks represent vertebrate species in Chile?

TOGNELLI, M.F., P.I. RAMIREZ DE ARELLANO, AND P.A. MARQUET.

Diversity and Distributions

Año: 2008 vol. 14 p. 148 - 158

1366-9516

Increasingly, biogeographical knowledge and analysis are playing a fundamental rolein assessing the representativeness of biodiversity in protected areas, and in identifyingcritical areas for conservation. With almost 20% of the country assigned to protectedareas, Chile is well above the conservation target (i.e. 10–12%) proposed by manyinternational conservation organizations. Moreover, the Chilean government hasrecently proposed new conservation priority sites to improve the current protectedarea network. Here, we used all 653 terrestrial vertebrate species present in continentalChile to assess the performance of the existing and proposed reserve networks. Usinggeographical information systems, we overlaid maps of species distribution, currentprotected areas, and proposed conservation priority sites to assess how well eachspecies is represented within these networks. Additionally, we performed a systematicreserve selection procedure to identify alternative conservation areas for expandingthe current reserve system. Our results show that over 13% of the species are notcovered by any existing protected area, and that 73% of Chilean vertebrate speciescan be considered partial gaps, with only a small fraction of their geographicalranges currently under protection. The coverage is also deficient for endemic (speciesconfined to Chile) and threatened species. While the proposed priority sites doincrease coverage, we found that there are still several gaps and these are not themost efficient choices. Both the gap analysis and the reserve selection analysisidentified important areas to be added to the existing reserve system, mostly innorthern and central Chile. This study underscores the need for a systematic conservationplanning approach to redefine the conservation priority sites in order to maximizethe representation of species, particularly endemic and threatened species.