Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 143, Issue 11, November 2010, Pages 2468-2476
Biological Conservation

The efficacy of Romania’s protected areas network in conserving biodiversity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2010.06.013Get rights and content

Abstract

Romania’s protected areas network currently covers 19.29% of the national territory, a significant increase from the 4.1% protected prior to 1989. The increase occurred over the past 20 years with the creation of 27 National and Natural Parks, and recently of 382 protected areas as part of the pan-European Natura 2000 network. Considering the recent increase in number and area of protected lands, we investigated two core topics critical to achieving conservation goals: (1) conservation value and (2) resources for conservation. The newly created Natura 2000 sites overlapped 96.19% of the existing protected areas network, generating up to three different protection statuses for some sites. Conservation goals were often unclear, as the focus switched to protecting species and habitats of European-level concern. Despite the fivefold increase in protected area, many ecoregions were poorly represented in the new system. Planning for conservation neither involved the local communities nor utilized principles for spatial prioritization. Over 80% of the species of European conservation concern were included in at least one protected area, but plants and invertebrates were underrepresented. Administrative bodies were generally under-staffed and poorly financed, conditions that were reflected in a poor enforcement and implementation of conservation goals. Overall, Romania shares many conservation concerns with other Eastern and Central European countries. A regional approach to conserving biodiversity based on spatial prioritization, rigorous scientific documentation, and social acceptance is needed for the Natura 2000 network to achieve its goals.

Introduction

Protected lands are set aside to conserve relatively intact ecosystems and threatened species and constitute the most widespread instrument used in conservation planning (Margules and Pressey, 2000). Besides their inherent ecological value (Gaston et al., 2008), in developing countries many protected areas (PAs) are created for their potential to alleviate social and economic issues faced by local communities (Silva, 2009). However, in spite of usually substantial political support for conservation, not all PAs are able to meet their conservation goals due economic and social constraints on exploiting the existing natural resources (Cabeza and Moilanen, 2006, Young et al., 2007, Lu et al., 2007. There are numerous instances (i.e., so-called “paper parks”) in which PAs generate, rather than alleviate, social conflicts; this is usually associated with insufficient funding (Strange et al., 2006, Hajkowicz et al., 2008) or lack of interest in conservation by local authorities and communities (Moore et al., 2004, Stolon, 2008).

The efficacy of PAs in conserving biodiversity depends on the interaction among three factors: (1) optimal design (i.e., sufficient area to conserve ecosystem integrity, overlapping boundaries with biodiversity hotspots or threatened species ranges, self-sustainability in the face of financial scarcity) (Hess et al., 2006, Wilson et al., 2009b), (2) optimal conservation strategies (Moilanen, 2008, Wilson et al., 2009a), and (3) adequate implementation of management activities and enforcement (Balmford et al., 2003, Walker, 2009).

The main policy instruments that govern the conservation of biodiversity in Europe are the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, and the European Union’s (EU) Habitats and Birds Directives (Gaston et al., 2008, Pullin et al., 2009). In some countries, the implementation of the Habitat Directive might have led to a decentralization of the national-level conservation policies and promoted multilevel governance (Mauerhofer, 2010). As a result, the responsibility for biodiversity conservation is shared among local and national governments and the European Commission (Paavola et al., 2009). In addition, the EU conservation objectives are integrated into other sectoral policies such as the Sustainable Development Strategy, the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, and the Water Framework Directive (Rauschmayer et al., 2009). The main target of the EU conservation policy is to create a pan-European protected areas network – the Natura 2000 network – that will facilitate the protection of species and habitats of European conservation interest (Fontaine et al., 2007). However, Natura 2000 sites do not act as wildlife refuges or strictly PAs (Apostolopoulou and Pantis, 2009). Anthropogenic activities that do not affect but rather facilitate the protection of species and maintenance of habitat integrity, such as traditional agricultural practices (i.e., manual hay mowing), limited grazing and logging, gathering of non-timber forest products (e.g., berries, mushrooms, medicinal plants), fishing, and hunting, are supported (Gaston et al., 2008). To achieve the proposed conservation and social goals, the Natura 2000 network requires a massive 5.58 billion EUR/year for administration in EU developed countries alone (Bladt et al., 2009). As a comparison, approximately the same amount is invested yearly in conservation worldwide, with developing countries accounting for <12% of the total (James et al., 2001, Bruner et al., 2004).

The coverage of the European Natura 2000 network is impressive: 22,419 terrestrial Sites of Community Importance (SCI, for habitats and/or species) covering 719,992 km2 (13.6% of EU) and 5242 terrestrial Special Protection Areas (SPA, for bird protection only) covering 547,819 km2 (11.1% of EU) (Anonymous, 2009). Overall, the network confers protection status to 986 vertebrates (64.8% of EU species), 164 invertebrates (0.1% of EU species) (Fontaine et al., 2007, Primack et al., 2008) and 1288 plants (10.3% of EU species) (Steck and Pautasso, 2008).

Historically, conservation planning in Romania evolved from mostly “paper parks” before 1990 to weakly funded, scattered conservation efforts between 1990 and 2006 (Primack et al., 2008). In 2007, the conservation focus switched again in response to the European Union provisions on expanding the Natura 2000 network. Starting in 2007, habitats and species of European-level concern became the focus of conservation efforts in Romania (Hartel et al., 2010). As a result, the Ministry of Environment, with the help of independent experts, proposed new Natura 2000 sites using criteria for declaring SCIs and SPAs from Annex III of the Habitats Directive. Furthermore, each site underwent a qualitative evaluation focused on the representation (presence/absence) of species and habitats of conservation concern. For the new sites that passed the qualitative screening procedure, quantitative criteria, such as the 20–60% representativity rule (Papp and Tóth, 2007) – excellent representation if >60% of habitat or species range was included in the Natura 2000 network, and insufficient representation if <20% was included – was used to select the final set of new Natura 2000 sites.

In many EU countries, the creation of the new Natura 2000 sites led to confusion related to the protection status (i.e., overlap among national, EU, and IUCN statuses) of existing and new protected areas (Dimitrakopoulos et al., 2004, Maiorano et al., 2007). Moreover, the local communities included in the Natura 2000 sites were informed about their incorporation only after the PAs were created, which led to new social tensions (Paavola et al., 2009, Rauschmayer et al., 2009).

The overarching goal of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of the Romanian PAs network in conserving biodiversity following the recent spatial expansion of the Natura 2000 network. Specifically, the research objectives are: (1) to document the representation of the natural regions (ecoregions) in the pre- and post-Natura 2000 PA system; (2) to analyze the overlap between the newly created PAs and the distributions of plant and animal species of European-level conservation concern; (3) to quantify the financial, human, logistic, and institutional resources available for PA management; and (4) to evaluate the outcomes of management activities in PAs that have functional administrations and compare their effectiveness pre- and post-Natura 2000 expansion.

Section snippets

GIS coverage and species data

To evaluate the representation of Romania’s ecoregions (Vădineanu et al., 1992) in the PAs network, we used a spatially explicit approach (Oldfield et al., 2004). Our analysis relied on a series of GIS coverage readily available for download from various data repositories. The PAs boundaries, ecoregions (Romania’s natural regions), Romania’s national boundary, and population density (100 × 100 m grid) in 2008 were downloaded from the Ministry of Environment website (http://www.mmediu.ro, accessed

Results

In 2009, the PAs network covered 45,991 km2 (19.29%) of Romania, mostly in the newly created SCIs (13.81% of Romania). The conservation of biodiversity is the focus for the majority (99.85%) of the PAs (Primack et al., 2008). The post-Natura 2000 PAs network includes 1323 sites: 53 scientific reserves (equivalent to IUCN category Ia), 13 National Parks (IUCN II), 227 natural monuments (IUCN III), 634 natural reserves (IUCN IV), 14 Natural Parks (IUCN V), 273 SCIs (Natura 2000), and 109 SPAs

Are Natura 2000 sites conserving biodiversity?

The vision of the Natura 2000 network as a social rather than ecological network limits its potential for conserving biodiversity (Maiorano et al., 2007), especially in Eastern European countries (Young et al., 2007, Bladt et al., 2009). Habitat disturbance, overexploitation, poaching, pollution, invasive species, disease, sub-optimal PAs design, and lack of enforcement of conservation regulations all plague Romanian conservation (Primack et al., 2008). These threats to biodiversity could only

Conclusions

Overall, the efficacy of Romania’s PAs network seems to have decreased following the creation of the Natura 2000 sites. At the time the Natura 2000 sites were created, the existing PAs network was still in its infancy, and the scarce resources for conservation were not evenly allocated among PAs. The sudden increase in protected lands, combined with little knowledge on species and habitat areal distributions, poor communication of conservation goals to the public, and financial issues, did not

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Richard Primack for supporting the ideas that formed the basis of this manuscript, Rachel Morrison and Iulia Pătroescu-Klotz for proofreading, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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