Resumen de Biodiversity conservation: between protected areas and local communities. A case study in picos de europa national park (northern spain)
There is an on-going debate on how to manage protected areas for effective long-term biodiversity conservation. Some authors embrace passive management approaches reducing human intervention in protected areas. This approach may be suitable for restoring natural ecosystems processes in large-scale abandoned areas. However, with a terrestrial surface increasingly dominated by human activities, other authors argue that conservation efforts should also pay attention to the role of humans on natural systems and resolve how to achieve biodiversity conservation without compromising the livelihood of the local communities living near or within to the protected areas. For this school of thought, traditional practices based in common resource management systems can help guaranteeing long-term biodiversity conservation.
This thesis examines traditional practices applied in forest commons and their potential impacts on biodiversity, aiming at identifying human activities that are favorable to biodiversity and that could be therefore used to maintain biodiversity on human-dominated landscapes. To do so, an interdisciplinary methodological approach is applied combining conventional analytical frameworks used in biological conservation science –i.e., direct measures of biodiversity such as species richness and evenness– and social analytical tools –i.e., ethnobiological and historical approaches.
Specifically, this thesis investigates the ecological outcomes of traditional practices applied in forest commons in Spain, a country with long history of forest community-ownership. First, through a review of the literature of the historical evolution of Spanish forest commons, this study examines management practices conducted during the performance of traditional livelihood activities applied by forest-dwelling communities that may have benefitted forest biodiversity and the impacts on biodiversity derived from replacing such practices by other management forms. Second, using a case study, this research explores the effectiveness of formally protecting an area on preserving species diversity compared to traditional management systems allowing local communities use of ecological resources. Data collection included botanical inventories as well as topographic, edaphic, and anthropogenic impact data from 50 0.2-hectares concentric plots distributed through neighboring forest commons inside and outside a protected area classified as an IUCN category II (National Park). In the final part of the thesis, qualitative data from 42 interviews to residents of the studied area are used to document traditional forest-related management practices shaping regional landscape mosaic and local perceptions of recent landscape changes.
Results from the literature review illustrate that, at the national level, interventionism and privatization of forest commons in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had negative consequences for forest biodiversity. At a local level, results of the study case do not support the idea that protected areas hold more biodiversity than surrounding areas and suggest that human factors are important drivers of tree species distribution. Results from this work also help identify a set of traditional management practices favorable to regional landscape patchiness and the maintenance of forest systems. Finally, information from local perception of historical landscape transformation in the study area suggests that local communities might be a valid source of information to monitor ongoing ecological changes.
The results of this dissertation indicate that certain traditional practices carried out in community-based resource management systems in the performance of their traditional activities are biodiversity-friendly. This finding might help in the design of biodiversity conservation efforts linking biodiversity maintenance and local development, which might be particularly relevant in the establishment of protected areas in populated zones.
