Lily Rodriguez's Beaked Toad (Rhinella lilyrodriguezae), a Peruvian amphibian known only from a single, very small locality-- a situation called point endemism. Point endemics from groups traditionally neglected in land-based conservation efforts, like amphibians, are a great example of the species that could benefit a great deal from microreserves. Photo courtesy of Anton Sorokin.
What makes for a “good” protected area? This question is increasingly relevant as many countries across the world have committed to a goal to protect 30% of the earth's land and water by the year 2030. Many might assume that setting aside large swathes of land is the most valuable approach, but new analysis led by UC Berkeley researchers shows that the conservation potential of smaller areas should not be discounted.
Published last week in Communications Biology, the study shows that very small protected areas, often termed ‘microreserves,” can be critically important tools for the protection of amphibians, which are the most underrepresented terrestrial vertebrates in the existing global network of protected areas. Since many amphibians have small ranges that do not necessarily overlap with important areas for the conservation of other groups of animals, small, targeted protected areas may often be required to ensure their protection.
“Microreserves represent a large proportion of newly-established protected areas, so there’s a lot we stand to gain if we start considering them as powerful conservation tools,” said Emma Steigerwald, who conducted the analysis as a graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management while chair of the AmphibiaWeb Conservation Working Group. “Many vulnerable taxa will never be protected if we don’t take the placement of microreserves very seriously.” Steigerwald pointed out that historically, targeted protected areas have sometimes been created for groups of animals like mammals or birds, but this has almost never been the case for smaller animals less traditionally considered to be 'charismatic', like amphibians.
The authors combined distribution maps for terrestrial vertebrate groups from AmphibiaWeb, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), BirdLife, and the Global Assessment of Reptile Distributions group with the World Database of Protected Areas for their analysis. They show that amphibians have smaller ranges, on average, than other terrestrial vertebrates, such that microreserves are frequently capable of protecting a substantial portion of amphibian ranges—particularly for threatened species. Yet, despite amphibians having been underrepresented by the protected area network for decades, the authors show that the pace at which new amphibian-containing microreserves are being established has slowed over time. They also demonstrate that adding new microreserves to a protected area network can increase its coverage of amphibian diversity much faster than adding larger protected areas.
“As amphibian biologists, we are so often focused on work about extinctions, declines, and the many threats and pressures—like disease and habitat loss—that amphibians are facing,” said Michelle Koo, the paper’s senior author and a staff curator at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ). “It’s been refreshing to focus on opportunities and solutions with this study.”
Many undergraduate researchers working in the MVZ over the past decade contributed towards curating amphibian range maps and associated data for AmphibiaWeb, which were crucial to the analysis. They include Jules Chen (BS ’22 Microbial Biology and Ecosystem Management and Forestry) and Julianne Oshiro (BS ’22 Environmental Sciences, BA ’22 Chemistry), two recent undergraduate apprentices working on data curation and processing towards this analysis with AmphibiaWeb. “This paper is an important example of how undergraduates at Berkeley can contribute to research on questions of real importance while getting insight into the scientific endeavor,” said Koo.
Steigerwald, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz, emphasized that the conservation potential of microreserves spans beyond the case of amphibians. “Microreserves can also be powerful tools for the conservation of other groups characterized by high proportions of species with small, disjunct distributions—like plants, insects, reptiles, and freshwater fish,” she said. “None of these groups have traditionally been the target species for land-based conservation efforts. So even for those species in groups with larger ranges, using microreserves to protect critical populations or habitats gives us many additional opportunities to address this historical bias.”