Protected areas promote mammal diversity, according from thousands of cameras

A new study from British Columbia provides further evidence that protected areas effectively use wildlife conservation.

Researchers from UBC's Faculty of Forestry examined data from a global data set containing 8,671 camera trap stations spread across four continents. They discovered more mammal diversity in survey areas where habitat was designated as protected instead of forests and other wilderness areas that did not have that designation.

This was true even when human disturbances such as recreational use and logging occurred in these protected areas. It's exciting evidence of the critical role that parks and nature reserves play in wildlife conservation," says Dr. Cole Burton (he/him), senior author of the study and a conservation biologist who studies mammal populations and human-wildlife coexistence.

"As international discussions on new global targets for expanding protected areas continue, it is critical to be able to quantify the benefits of the protections that already exist."

According to first author Cheng Chen (he/him), a forestry Ph.D. student who relied on two international wildlife camera databases for his analysis, "this is the largest number of wildlife cameras ever analyzed in a single study."

According to Burton, protected areas are the last strongholds of many endangered mammals. However, he adds that mammals are a particularly difficult group to save because they require large areas for habitat and thus frequently come into conflict with people.

"If we want to keep larger mammals around, as well as the critical roles they play in ecosystems," Burton says, "we need to keep focusing on the expansion of the protected area network." "The world is currently debating new targets for how much of the earth's surface should be covered by parks under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Better information is required to inform these policy discussions. Hopefully, this research will help to fill in the gaps in our knowledge."