Spatial analysis guiding decision making in environmental conservation: Systematic conservation planning and ecosystem services

Abstract

Achieving conservation targets for sustainable development has been one of society’s greatest challenges. In this context, environmental conservation approaches such as Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP) and ecosystem services (ES) have become increasingly popular as feasible solutions for the allocation, delimitation, and management of protected areas. These approaches, often used to drive public policies based on payment for environmental services, have highlighted the intrinsic relationships between the paradigms of geography and spatial analysis (SA), as they rely on space-time processes and multidisciplinary concepts for the analysis of the biophysical, social, and economic variables. In this context, this manuscript aimed to outline the relevance of SA as a geographic perspective for the progress of environmental conservation. The arguments were here aligned in the following steps: (i) concepts around protected areas and the factors that impact them; (ii) environmental conservation approaches used to allocate and delimit protected areas, and their respective features, limitations, and related definitions; and (iii) correlations between SA and the use of ES and SCP (paradigms, advances, and contributions). As major findings, it was indicated that the SCP and ES work in a space-time dimension to measure and describe patterns of abstract phenomena using spatial analysis techniques. Moreover, we identified that conceptual mismatches and the absence of a common language to environmental conservation approaches reduces the expressive participation of geography that has its focus on determination the abstract features of observed objects or phenomena. It is important, however, that its paradigms become an essential methodological component in environmental approaches to the quantification and delimitation of the elements and natural processes.