Study On Ecosystem-based Conservation Priority Pattern Of Marine Biodiversity In Xiamen Bay

Human survival,economic prosperity and overall quality of life of coastal population to a large extent depend on the goods and services the marine ecosystems provide.Marine biodiversity,including diversity within species,between species and of ecosystems,is the base of marine ecosystems to provide these goods and services for human.Moreover,marine biodiversity is very important for evolution and for maintaining life sustaining systems of the biosphere.Rapid economic growth,increased human population and weak planning and management in coastal region have led to substantial loss of biodiversity,and then damaged the capability of many marine ecosystems to provide goods and services for human,which jeopardizes the coastal sustainability.While the academic and management communities recognize that well designed Marine Protected Areas(MPA)is effective tool for marine biodiversity protection,current MPA often considers single objective such as endangered species or important natural ecosystems,and ignores the integrity of ecosystems and their components,which results in the fraagmentation and isolated distribution of MPA.Many MPA were planned at administration boundary and ignore the connectivity of ecosystems,which lower the effectiveness of MPA.Meanwhile,many MPA did not consider the balance of economic and biodiversity protection,which resulted in the MPA on the paper due to high protection costs.The challenge,therefore,is to develop science-based planning models that consider simultaneously the biodiversity protection and socioeconomic costs of protection and help develop the conservation priority pattern,such that social,economic and ecological objectives can be met in a single solution.This paper studied the conservation priority pattern of marine biodiversity protection in Xiamen bay employing the theories and methods of ecology,economics and systematic planning,and tools of MARXAN and ArcGIS.Following results have been achieved in this paper.1)This paper proposed the idea of ecosystem-based conservation priority pattern of marine biodiversity protection through research systematically the evaluation of biodiversity protection theory.Over past 30 decades,with the understandings of relation of human and environment,the theory of biodiversity conservation has progressed through periods of framing conservation as'nature for itself';to'nature for people',and to'people and nature'.MPA is no longer is the focus on those isolated reserve 'islands' in a landscape.Rather,MPA is to create shared landscapes between people and nature,with strong emphasis on maintaining ecological processes,adaptability and resilience in this social-ecological space.MPA should consider the ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part,and also the socioeconomic factors of biodiversity protection,so that to achieve the protection objectives of protection at least costs.In this case,development of conservation priority pattern should be at ecosystem scale but not at the administrative scale.2)This paper established a model to develop the ecosystem-based conservation priority pattern of marine biodiversity.The central idea of the model is to find the minimum cost solution of marine biodiversity protection at ecosystem scale.The objective function of the model is the socioeconomic costs of biodiversity,which include the opportunity costs of protection and the management costs of MPA in term of total length of planning units.Minimizing the total length of planning units indicates also that the connectivity of ecosystems is integrated into the model.The constraint functions of the model include the designed protected objects and their targets.3)This paper identified the protected objects and their targets in Xiamen Bay considering the facts such as ecological representativeness,values and scarcity.The identified protected objects included the objects indicating the species diversity,such as zooplankton,benthic organisms,swimming animals,fish eggs and larvae,the objects indicating the habitats diversity such as vegetated wetland(mangroves and salt marsh),and objects indicating the flag species such as the Chines white dolphin and lancelet.4)This paper developed the ecosystem-based conservation priority pattern of marine biodiversity in Xiamen Bay employing the established model.The results show that the marine biodiversity priority conservation area(PCA)is about 188 km2,accounting for about 15%of the total sea area of Xiamen bay,and the cost is 299 million yuan/a.The key-priority conservation area covers 72 km2,accounting for 5.65%of the total sea area,with a total cost of 143 million yuan/a.The second-priority conservation area covers 116 km2,accounting for 9.06%of the total,with a total cost of 156 million yuan/a.The PCA under the jurisdiction of Xiamen city takes up a large proportion,with a total area of 123 km2,accounting for 65%of the total PCA and 35%of the Xiamen sea area.The PCA within the jurisdiction of Longhai city is 48 Km2,accounting for 26%of the total PCA.The protection cost is mainly distributed in Xiamen,which is 286 million yuan/a,accounting for 95.65%of the total protection cost.By comparing the conservation pattern of species diversity based on ecosystem with the priority conservation pattern based on administrative region and the priority conservation pattern based on endangered species,we can find that the protection cost is as follows:endangered species<ecosystem<administrative region;Protected area:endangered species<ecosystem<administrative region;Protection cost per unit area:ecosystem<administrative region<endangered species,so in terms of protection cost,representativeness,feasibility and protected benefit,systematic conservation planning is superior to non-systematic conservation planning.5)Comparing the ecosystem-based conservation priority pattern and the marine ecological protection redline,we can find that ecosystem-based conservation priority pattern can achieve the same or higher protection targets at about 83%of the sea area and 40%of costs of marine ecological protection redline.These results indicate that ecosystem-based conservation priority pattern is more cost-effcient than that of the marine ecological protection redline.