Conservation Planning of Oak Woodlands in Portugal and California

Book excerpt: Mediterranean ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots'; however, translating conservation needs into implementation has been hindered by their function as working landscapes that integrate both human and natural components. The goal of this dissertation was to establish a regional level conservation plan following the guidelines of the systematic conservation planning framework for oak woodland working landscapes in Portugal and California. I used a systems approach that suggests that to address a question at a focal level (regional level conservation planning - the scale of analysis that matches both organism responses and the implementation of conservation actions), higher and lower levels of organization are required to understand the phenomena at hand. The higher level is one that provides context, constraints, controls and boundaries, and I considered this as the description of the socio-economic context of oak woodlands (Chapter 1). This chapter focused on answering whether conservation policy can be reshaped to conserve Mediterranean oak woodland ecosystems with differing sociopolitical cultural contexts? The lower level is one that describes the components, mechanisms and initiating conditions, and I considered this as the descriptions of species habitat use (Chapters 2 and 3). These chapters focused on answering which types of information we should use to describe habitat use patterns of wildlife species using oak woodlands, and how to integrate variability in space, time and species yearly cycle. Finally, I integrated the information from higher and lower levels at the focal level of analysis (Chapter 4). In this chapter I assessed if yearly habitat for wildlife species is well represented with the current protected areas, and is the role of the working landscapes. In Chapter 1, I show that oak woodlands are managed to maximize revenue from one or more resources; however, persistence of these resources is threatened by replacement rate, land-use history and interdependence with other resources. Nonetheless, conservation action can be likely supported by the willingness that Iberian and Californian landowners expressed to withstand some opportunity costs to preserve their `way of life', or existence and option values. Moving forward, conservation action has several challenges that include changes in current biodiversity, changes in current market incentives for oak woodland products, application of current and creation of new conservation tools and policies, patterns of people migration and land abandonment, regeneration and restoration, and fire and climate change. In chapters 2 and 3, I show that integration of multiple source descriptions of environmental parameters improved our understanding of mesocarnivore use of oak woodlands. The most parsimonious model included descriptions of four components of habitat: type (measured as land cover type), heterogeneity (measured as canopy cover), quality (measured as productivity over time), and persistence (measured as stress: phenology and water stress over time). Further, I found that habitat use models improved when matching the time of species detections with that of the measured components of habitats, and that habitat use is closely related to species yearly life cycle periods (especially reproduction). In chapter 4, I assessed how well protected and non protected areas match the spatial and temporal habitat requirements of mesocarnivores, and found that California protected areas do a better job than Portuguese ones. Further, there is an important and often overlooked component of the spatial and temporal habitat that is only present in non protected areas, in the working landscapes. This suggests two avenues for conservation: by increasing the number of protected areas to encompass species-habitat dynamics, and/or to develop conservation actions directed towards the working landscapes. Future conservation of oak woodlands in Portugal and California face many challenges, and creative solutions are required to move the decision support work presented herein towards decision making, implementation, and monitoring at a scale that matches both organism responses and conservation actions.