Private Land Conservation Can Protect Brazilian Cerrado

Areas set aside for conservation within private lands could play a valuable role in protecting the biodiversity of the Brazilian Cerrado, according to a new study. The analysis in this region – a vast tropical savannah in central Brazil where private agricultural land use often conflicts with conventional conservation approaches – suggests that sharing the responsibility for protecting biodiversity with the private sector could rapidly increase international commitments to avoid biodiversity loss. Protected areas, such as national parks, wilderness areas, and managed resource protected areas, are crucial to long-term biodiversity conservation. Although these areas account for roughly 20% of the planet's surface, analyses show they are insufficient to protect global biodiversity. Much of the land in human-populated regions is privately owned; thus, improving the biodiversity-friendliness of private landholdings could enhance biodiversity conservation by increasing total land protection and habitat connectivity between public lands. However, despite the potential, the role of private lands in achieving conservation goals has been largely overlooked. Paulo De Marco and colleagues leverage data from Brazil's Native Vegetation Protection Law – a decades-old law that requires rural land owners to set-aside areas within private properties as protected legal reserves – to evaluate whether these set-aside areas contribute to the overall biodiversity conservation in the Brazilian Cerrado. De Marco et al. analyzed distribution data for threatened terrestrial vertebrates that live within the Cerrado and found that the private protected areas accommodate up to 14.5% of threatened vertebrate species' ranges, which increases to 25% when considering the distribution of remaining native habitat. This makes private lands' relevance for conservation in the region much higher than is now assumed, say the authors, and suggests that restoring private protected areas is an important conservation goal that deserves special funds and attention. "The most important message that the decision-makers should take home from the study of De Marco et al. is that the role of private rural properties in protecting native species in the Cerrado is vital to complement the conservation activities promoted within public protected areas," write Ricardo Machado and Ludmilla Aguiar in a related Perspective. "Only a combination of public and private efforts will achieve the international commitments to prevent biodiversity loss."