Assessing protected area effectiveness

A new study published in Conservation Letters aims to measure whether parks and reserves in the tropics succeed in protecting forests. Just as deforestation rates in remote protected areas should not be compared with deforestation rates from more accessible and lower altitude unprotected areas, it is also critical to control for government-mediated access in the form of regulations governing unprotected lands." - —Professor Nigel Leader-Williams The new study disentangled the effects of regulations governing access in unprotected lands surrounding the 110,000 sq km protected area network on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Its results showed that measures of the effectiveness of protection differed according to the different land use regulations governing unprotected lands outside protected area boundaries. The study, led by David Gaveau of Stanford University, and co-authored by Professor Nigel Leader-Williams, a conservation scientist from the University of Cambridge, introduces another twist in the tale of measurement bias. Its results show that controlling for geographic access alone is not enough to remove all measurement biases, which may have led to over-estimating the effectiveness of protected areas because they did not control for government-sanctioned access such as conversion to industrial-scale oil palm or rubber plantations.