Integrating habitat risk and landscape resilience in forest protection and restoration planning for biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Forests, which harbor most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity, have been and continue to be impacted by significant threats from human activities. Improving biodiversity conservation outcomes requires proactive and effective management actions to address the increasing risks, rather than merely maintaining forest cover. However, few studies have explored how to spatially inform diversified management actions by incorporating risk information into forest protection and restoration planning. Here, we propose an integrated framework for planning forest protection and restoration that integrates landscape resilience and habitat risk assessment, aiming to identify priority areas for diversified management actions, including active protection (AP), passive protection (PP), active restoration (AR), and passive restoration (PR). This framework consists of three key steps: i) evaluating landscape resilience based on forest amount and functional connectivity, ii) assessing habitat risk using the InVEST model, and iii) identifying priority areas and corresponding management actions by spatial overlap analysis between landscape resilience and habitat risk. Using the central region of the Wuhan Metropolitan Area as a case study, we divided it into 3307 planning units, referred to as Focal Landscapes (FLs). The results indicate that there are 636 FLs in the AP zone, 498 in the PP zone, 508 in the AR zone, and 13 in the PR zone. This research demonstrates how effectively integrating risk considerations can enhance the planning process and outcomes. This study also underscores the potential to improve the outcome and cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation through the formulation of differentiated management actions and comprehensive planning for protection and restoration.