Towards a better understanding of protected-area management costs
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Natural Resource Management
- Keywords
- parks, spending, forecasting, prioritization, accountancy, effectiveness
- Copyright
- © 2018 Craigie et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Towards a better understanding of protected-area management costs. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26576v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26576v1
Abstract
Data on protected area (PA) management costs are essential for effective conservation planning and management. To be most useful, these data should be at high resolution, in terms of individual management units within PA systems and individual management actions. Ideally, data would also capture temporal changes in management costs in relation to disturbance events, and variations in biophysical and social context. Yet there remains no generally accepted method to collect these important high-resolution data. Here we present a new method for the collection of data on current management spending and the costs of managing PAs to explicit, and usually higher, standards than presently achieved. The method allows the gathering of data at higher spatial, temporal, and thematic resolution than has been achieved before. We highlight the strengths and potential pitfalls of this type of data collection and offer insights into how these data can be used for the benefit of PA managers, conservation planners, and policy-makers. The methods presented here could be adapted to be used by other PA management agencies and jurisdictions to better understand the costs of managing PAs effectively.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
Supplemental Information
Questionnaire developed to capture the data described in the manuscript, designed to be used in face to face workshops settings
Questionnaire developed to capture the data described in the manuscript, designed to be used in face to face workshops settings, note multiple tabs for different pages.