Title
Conservation Decision Making for Protected Areas in Latin America.
Author(s)
Ruiz-Gutierrez, Viviana; Goldstein, Isaac
Published
2017
Abstract
Protected areas are considered as one of the most effective strategies for conserving the world’s biodiversity and natural capital. Although Latin America has the most land within protected areas in the world, 45% of all areas in the region are significantly threatened by land and forest degradation. There is a critical need for effective conservation and management actions to preserve the integrity of protected areas in Latin America. For most protected areas in the region, staff and officials often lack access to basic sources of information needed to develop and prioritize actions. To best address this challenge, we need cost-effective, scalable tools that can provide robust information that is directly linked to the decision-making infrastructure of the protected areas themselves. Here, we present an overview of the issues at hand, and provide examples of case studies in protected areas in Central and South America of cost-effective approaches for collecting information al multiple scales. We further present how this information is used to guide conservation and management on the ground. In addition, we present examples of platforms and approaches for collecting information that includes the participation of the communities themselves in the data collection and decision-making processes.

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