Reviewing Biosphere Reserves globally: effective conservation action or bureaucratic label?

UNESCO-MAB Biosphere Reserves already deal with ecosystem services and sustainable development.

Xu et al. (1) make a most useful contribution to the debate on protected areas (PAs) in China and make a welcome focus on ecosystem services rather than threatened species. Nonetheless, their continued focus is on the establishment of PAs, rather than wider landscape-scale approaches, which are more suitable to the Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, they say, “First, ...

Urban Biosphere Reserves: Integrating Conservation, Community and Sustainability

Reply to Bridgewater and Babin: Need for a new protected area category for ecosystem services.

We thank Bridgewater and Babin (1) for their perspective. We are aware of, and appreciate, the consideration of ecosystem services in the management of Biosphere Reserves. However, we see a strong imperative for establishing a protected area (PA) category focused specifically on protecting ecosystem services, for several key reasons articulated in our paper (2) and below. First, although China ...

The biodiversity data knowledge gap: assessing information loss in the management of Biosphere Reserves

The knowledge of biodiversity within an area is vital if we want to develop adequate conservation strategies. Biosphere Reserves are purposefully established for the sustainable use of their resources, and therefore their biodiversity should be well known. We compared and evaluated information available for Mexican Biosphere Reserves on threatened and non-threatened vertebrate species records f...

The Efficacy of Landscape-Level Conservation in Changbai Mountain Biosphere Reserve, China

Anthropogenic landscape alteration is rather common in many protected areas (PAs), jeopardizing the efficacy of PAs conservation. However, the general consensus is that PAs still remain effective in habitat conservation. To assess the efficacy of landscape-level conservation, we examined landscape alterations in the Changbai Mountain Biosphere Reserve (CMBR), which was established in 1960 as a ...