Protected areas (PAs) have been a foundational tool for the conservation of terrestrial biodiversity, and in recent years have been widely used for marine conservation. The contributions that PAs make to freshwater conservation, and their relationships to management and policy actions external to them that may be necessary for their success, remain unstudied.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, about 12% of the world’s inland waters overlap with PAs, but the majority of these areas have not been designed nor designated to protect freshwater systems. The tight linkages between freshwater habitat conditions and threats in their catchments make it necessary to design and manage protected areas within the broader context in which they exist. Threats and mitigation actions external to protected areas potentially have a large influence on the conservation potential and success of protected areas for freshwater conservation.

The need is real for better understanding both the conservation potential of existing PAs and the role that management and policy actions play in achieving conservation objectives. In 2006, Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity (COP 8) adopted objectives for achieving the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Programs of Work, including inland wetlands biodiversity objectives:

• at least 10% of known inland wetland ecosystem area effectively conserved and under integrated river or lake basin management; and

• 275 million hectares of wetlands of particular importance to biodiversity protected, including representation and equitable distribution of areas of different wetland types across the range of biogeographic zones.

These objectives are not only about what freshwater features are contained within protected areas, they are about having those freshwater features effectively conserved.

The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund US are currently working together to evaluate how protected area management designation, size, drainage network position, and impacts to flow and water quality external to protected areas influence their potential to conserve freshwater biodiversity. What is needed in addition to understanding this physical context is an understanding to what extent management and policy within protected areas and within the broader catchment context they exist in, contribute to the conservation success of protected areas for freshwater conservation. This is, in essence, an evaluation of the need for integrated basin management for freshwater conservation. This need is being raised in the conservation literature, but it has not been well defined or implemented. Such an evaluation would contribute to better understanding the needs and options for improving the conservation of freshwater biodiversity within protected areas through a broader perspective of integrated basin management.

We propose to build off of the work of TNC and WWF and others to address the role that management and policy play in defining the conservation potential and success of freshwater conservation within protected and managed areas. Our study will include review of the work by David Allan et al. on the inventory of freshwater features contained with in Michigan’s protected areas. This research would contribute immediately to the landscape-scale freshwater conservation efforts of The Nature Conservancy and State Wildlife Action Plans, and would provide critical information that could be incorporated into management and assessment guidance for protected areas through The Nature Conservancy and the World Congress on Protected Areas. We would aim to answer the following questions:

1) Do management and policy actions both within and outside a protected area influence its freshwater conservation potential and success?

 2) If the answer to #1 is yes: What are the attributes of management and policy external to protected areas that have the greatest impact on freshwater conservation within protected areas? Are they different actions, larger in scope, provide landscape-scale protection and management that exceed the capacities of protected areas?

3) Do management and policy within and outside protected areas tend to complement each other and provide synergistic benefits to freshwater conservation, or are they poorly aligned? 4) What are the opportunities to generate more effective management and policy in an integrated fashion to better conserve freshwater biodiversity in protected areas?

The Nature Conservancy, Aquatic GAP, Institute of Fisheries Research, the National Fish Habitat Action Plan, and several states in the Great Lakes Basin have developed spatial data on protected and managed areas, freshwater ecosystem types, and condition of freshwater habitats. We propose using these data with some GIS support from The Nature Conservancy, to apply results emerging from the efforts of TNC and WWF to define the conservation potential of protected areas based in their physical context.

The focus of our efforts will be to categorize and map the types of management and policies in place within and outside protected areas. We will evaluate the intent, scope, and the capacity to implement management and policy actions. Policies that we will evaluate include water quality water use, land use, fisheries, infrastructure development, flow management, urban growth, point source pollution, etc. We will use a basic, easily available suite of indicators of freshwater habitat and biodiversity conditions to explore trends in the status of aquatic habitats in protected areas under different management and policy landscapes. TNC is working with a consortium of federal and state agencies and NGOs to map and describe protection and management activities and their potential to secure biodiversity across the United States. These are currently focused on managed and protected federal, state and private lands. A list of attributes of managed and protected areas is being developed to generate a national database. We can contribute to this effort by providing a framework for mapping and characterizing management and policy as they relate to freshwater biodiversity conservation, a well needed contribution that is not included in current gap assessments of biodiversity conservation.