Valuing a Natura 2000 network site to inform land use options using a discrete choice experiment: An illustration from the Basque Country

One of the main problems that public institutions face in the management of protected areas, such as the European Natura 2000 network, is determining how to design and implement sustainable management plans that account for the wide range of marketed and non-marketed benefits they provide to society. This paper presents an application of a stated preference valuation approach aimed at evaluating the social preferences of the population of the Basque Country, Spain, for the key attributes of a regional Natura 2000 network site. According to our results, individuals’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) is higher for attributes associated with non-use values (native tree species and biodiversity conservation) than for attributes associated with use values (agricultural development and commercial forestry). The paper concludes that management policies related to Natura 2000 network sites should account for both for the importance of non-use values and the heterogeneity of the population's preferences in order to minimize potential land use conflicts.

Landscape Genetics for the Empirical Assessment of Resistance Surfaces: The European Pine Marten (Martes martes) as a Target-Species of a Regional Ecological Network

Coherent ecological networks (EN) composed of core areas linked by ecological corridors are being developed worldwide with the goal of promoting landscape connectivity and biodiversity conservation. However, empirical assessment of the performance of EN designs is critical to evaluate the utility of these networks to mitigate effects of habitat loss and fragmentation. Landscape genetics provides a particularly valuable framework to address the question of functional connectivity by providing a direct means to investigate the effects of landscape structure on gene flow. The goals of this study are (1) to evaluate the landscape features that drive gene flow of an EN target species (European pine marten), and (2) evaluate the optimality of a regional EN design in providing connectivity for this species within the Basque Country (North Spain). Using partial Mantel tests in a reciprocal causal modeling framework we competed 59 alternative models, including isolation by distance and the regional EN. Our analysis indicated that the regional EN was among the most supported resistance models for the pine marten, but was not the best supported model. Gene flow of pine marten in northern Spain is facilitated by natural vegetation, and is resisted by anthropogenic landcover types and roads. Our results suggest that the regional EN design being implemented in the Basque Country will effectively facilitate gene flow of forest dwelling species at regional scale.