Using Big Data to Better Understand the Socioecological Implications of Protected Areas

This poster was presented at the AGU Fall Meeting 2020 during the session: Bridging Systems Modeling Advances Across Socioecological Domains II Posters (GC008)

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Abstract:

Protected areas (PAs) are regarded as the backbone of biodiversity conservation, but their existence is often tenuous, and they often occupy contested space. To be sustainable, the local and wider community needs to be supportive, and for this to happen, they should not be disadvantaged by the existence of a PA, rather the PA should enhance the well-being of the communities that live around them. With large amounts of satellite and GIS data being generated over the past 40 years, and a wealth of data published on the socio-economic status of many countries around the world, we have unprecedented spatial and longitudinal resources. Coupled with the increasing sophistication of statistical methodologies, we have a great opportunity to dig deeper into the relationship between a PA and their surrounding community, and to develop ways to share this knowledge to improve decision-making across the globe. We present here some initial work that begins to address this opportunity through a multi-national project called “Building New Tools for Data Sharing and Re-use through a Transnational Investigation of the Socioeconomic Impacts of Protected Areas” (abbreviated to PARSEC). Hypothesizing that the relationship between PAs and local communities varies by ecoregion and regional economics, we highlight some of the geospatial approaches used to socio-ecologically characterize PAs in the context of local communities in order to statistically explore these important relationships.

The PARSEC project is funded by the Belmont Forum, Collaborative Research Action on Science-Driven e-Infrastructures Innovation.