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Do Protected Areas Reduce Forest Fragmentation? A Microlandscapes Approach

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Abstract

Conservation policies influence both the amount of habitat loss and patterns of habitat fragmentation. This paper develops a “microlandscapes” approach that combines fragmentation measures with quasi-experimental evaluation methods in order to assess the effects of policy on habitat fragmentation. As an application, the paper estimates whether and to what extent wildlife sanctuaries and national parks in Thailand prevented forest loss and fragmentation. I find that both types of protected areas significantly increased forest cover, average forest patch size and maximum forest patch size. Comparisons between the two types indicate that wildlife sanctuaries were more effective than national parks in terms of protecting forest in the interior versus exterior areas of parks and preventing fragmentation conditional on the level of forest cover. The differences are consistent with predicted differences resulting from spatial patterns of enforcement that are uniform or core-focused in the wildlife sanctuaries versus boundary-focused or include agglomeration penalties in the national parks. Given the greater effectiveness of wildlife sanctuaries in preventing fragmentation and the suggestive link to enforcement types, these results reinforce existing theoretical work urging conservation managers to consider how the spatial distribution of enforcement may affect patterns of resource use.

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Notes

  1. A 2003 report by the International Center for Environmental Management estimated that more than 500,000 people were living inside the strictly protected areas in Thailand. Legally, wildlife sanctuaries footnote 1 continued are similar to IUCN Category I areas while national parks are similar to IUCN Category II areas. The laws governing the two major types of protected areas and establishing the process for their designation were passed in the 1960s and remained in force without major changes throughout the period of this study.

  2. The literature on habitat fragmentation contains numerous possible metrics for assessing outcomes, due to the many possible configurations of habitat (O’Neill 1988; Turner 1990; Gustafson 1998; McGarigal and Cushman 2002). The chosen metrics measure both size and shape of habitat patches (Betts 2000; McGarigal and Cushman 2002). Larger forest patch sizes are important for species which cannot easily cross deforested areas to forage or reproduce. Habitat patch shape is important for species which require a safe distance from the edge of a patch and thus prefer patches with more core habitat. Smaller forest patch perimeter to area ratios indicate more core habitat relative to edge habitat (picture the difference between a circle and an amoeba shape). Larger cleared patch sizes and a lower density of cleared patches also indicate more core forest habitat, i.e. forested landscapes which are less broken-up by many small, dispersed areas of clearing (picture a solid block of forest versus one with lots of holes). Forest patch size tends to increase with forest cover, but forest patch perimeter to area ratio and the density of cleared patches do not necessarily vary monotonically with forest cover (see Sect. 3.1 for an example), so are compared here conditional on forest cover.

  3. An earlier study of Oregon watersheds also finds that land ownership structure is related to size of forest patches (Stanfield et al. 2002).

  4. For simplicity, land quality is assumed to be a function of distance to the nearest water source, but additional sources of heterogeneity in land quality such as soil type, slope, aspect, distance to local villages or paths, etc. could also be important. Adding more dimensions to the land quality function would change the specific patterns on the microlandscape but not the overall conclusion that fragmentation will be driven by patchy or branching distributions of land quality.

  5. This corresponds to an assumption that the microlandscape is small compared to the overall labor market and workers are freely mobile. Since this mobility assumption may not hold, the implications of relaxing it are also discussed in Sect. 3.3.

  6. Parameter values are illustrative and are not based on calibrations. The predictions described below are based on tendencies from experimenting with a variety of different parameter values. Excel model available on request.

  7. As an example, consider additional scenarios on the same landscape pictured in Fig. 1. At \(p^{a}=.7\), there would be 1 % cleared and 1 cleared patch; at \(p^{a}=.79\), 5 % cleared and 3 cleared patches; at \(p^{a}=.85\), 10 % cleared and 4 cleared patches; at \(p^{a}=1.01\), 30 % cleared and 5 cleared patches; at \(p^{a}=1.15\), 50 % cleared, 2 cleared patches and at \(p^{a}=1.36\), 70 % cleared and 1 cleared patch. This non-monotonic relationship happens because clearing initially spreads to more small dispersed areas and the density of cleared patches increases, but at high levels of deforestation the cleared patches merge together and cleared patch density decreases.

  8. Apparently villagers responded by collecting less per trip to remain below the limits!

  9. Note this assumes that transportation costs matter and are correlated with distance to the boundary of the protected area. If households are not well-integrated with markets (i.e. most agriculture is grown for household use and does not use market inputs), then clearing decisions would only be weakly related to transportation costs and the differences between enforcement types would be small.

  10. There are likely to be at least some factors which limit the mobility of labor. In Thailand these include the system of identification and political registration which is tied to village of birth, poorly defined private property rights, and the advantages of extended family networks in home villages.

  11. Uniform enforcement generally produces similar patterns of fragmentation conditional on forest cover as a no protection case with lower agricultural prices. If production is linear in land quality, the patterns are the same (both a price decrease and a uniform penalty reduce rents by a constant amount); if production has diminishing returns in land quality then uniform enforcement tends to create more fragmentation.

  12. The satellite-based classifications were compared to an analysis based on aerial photos and fieldwork that was done for a small number of sites in Northern Thailand at a similar time (Thomas et al. 2004). This indicated that the classified layers are fairly accurate at picking up fully cleared areas for growing rice or other annual crops, but that tree crops and early secondary regrowth (fallow) may be classified as forest.

  13. Schmidt-Vogt (1998), for instance, documents areas equivalent to a square of 800  m \(\times \) 800  m being cleared for one village. However, depending on terrain and ethnic group, individual households may also clear land so it is possible that some very small clearings are not visible.

  14. Wild animals rescue foundation of Thailand (www.warthai.org), “Gibbon Rehabilitation Project.” Accessed October, 2011; Brockelman, W. & Geissmann, T. 2008. ”Hylobates lar: IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Accessed October 2011.

  15. University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu) “Macaca fascicularis” Accessed October, 2011.

  16. Matching methods help to select a control group for which there are high levels of overlap between covariates (Ho et al. 2007). This can reduce bias due to functional form choices in standard regression models in cases where treatment and overall control groups are quite dissimilar (Imbens 2007; Rosenbaum and Rubin 1985).

  17. I use the logs of each of the slope, elevation and distance variables.

  18. This focuses the analysis on landscapes which have significant forest assets to start and thus would be the subject of concern about forest fragmentation. However, the results are robust to including all grid cells with more than 25 or 75 % forest cover in 1973 (results available from author).

  19. For instance, Butler et al. (2004) finds that model fit improves when the spatial configuration of returns within each landscape is included.

  20. I check the robustness of the results to using lagged protection variables as well. The increases in forest cover and forest patch size are robust to using protection from the previous period and to including both current and lagged protection variables (results available from author).

  21. As an alternate robustness check to deal with possible spatial autocorrelation, I also take a random 20 % sample of the dataset. The significant decreases in forest fragmentation are robust to this check (results available from author).

  22. Using the rule of thumb of .25 standard deviations as a substantial difference, landscapes with wildlife sanctuaries were sited further from 1962 roads and railways and had less ecoregion 3 forest type (tropical and sub-tropical dry broadleaf forest).

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  1. Department of Economics, AC 2201, Amherst College, Amherst, MA, 01002-5000, USA

    Katharine R. E. Sims

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Sims, K.R.E. Do Protected Areas Reduce Forest Fragmentation? A Microlandscapes Approach. Environ Resource Econ 58, 303–333 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-013-9707-2

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