In spite of the worldwide largest proportional loss of mires, Europe is a continent with important mire diversity. This article analyses the condition and protection status of European mire ecosystems. The overview is based on the system of European mire regions, representing regional variety and ecosystem biodiversity. We combined peatland distribution data with land cover maps of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service as well as with the World Database on Protected Areas to assess the extent of degraded peatlands and the proportion of peatlands located in protected areas in each European mire region. The total proportion of degraded peatlands in Europe is 25%; within the EU it is 50% (120,000 km2). The proportion of degradation clearly increases from north to south, as does the proportion of peatlands located within protected areas. In more than half of Europe’s mire regions, the target of at least 17% of the area located in protected areas is not met with respect to peatlands. Data quality is discussed and the lessons learned from Europe for peatland conservation are presented.

Humanity will soon define a new era for nature-one that seeks to transform decades of underwhelming responses to the global biodiversity crisis. Area-based conservation efforts, which include both protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, are likely to extend and diversify. However, persistent shortfalls in ecological representation and management effectiveness diminish the potential role of area-based conservation in stemming biodiversity loss. Here we show how the expansion of protected areas by national governments since 2010 has had limited success in increasing the coverage across different elements of biodiversity (ecoregions, 12,056 threatened species, 'Key Biodiversity Areas' and wilderness areas) and ecosystem services (productive fisheries, and carbon services on land and sea). To be more successful after 2020, area-based conservation must contribute more effectively to meeting global biodiversity goals-ranging from preventing extinctions to retaining the most-intact ecosystems-and must better collaborate with the many Indigenous peoples, community groups and private initiatives that are central to the successful conservation of biodiversity. The long-term success of area-based conservation requires parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to secure adequate financing, plan for climate change and make biodiversity conservation a far stronger part of land, water and sea management policies. The long-term success of area-based conservation-including both protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures-after 2020 will depend on governments securing adequate funding and prioritizing biodiversity in land, water and sea management.

Aim The establishment of protected areas is among the most widespread responses to mitigate species loss. Although protected areas are often assumed to have conservation benefits, negative impacts have also been documented. One potential negative outcome is leakage, whereby protected areas displace land-use activities harmful to conservation into adjacent areas. This can undermine protection by accelerating loss of species or skewing judgements of effectiveness. This study assessed the prevalence of deforestation leakage in a pan-tropical and subtropical selection of 120 protected areas. Location Tropical and subtropical forest regions of America, Africa and Asia. Time period 2001-2017. Major taxa studied Threatened species of amphibians, birds and terrestrial mammals. Methods We used Global Forest Change data to assess the average yearly rate of deforestation in protected areas, protected area buffer zones and statistically matched, unprotected control areas. We calculated and compared irreplaceability of habitat for threatened amphibian, bird and terrestrial mammal species between protected areas and buffer zones. Results In 55 cases, deforestation rates were higher in buffer zones than in protected and control areas, suggesting a relatively high prevalence of deforestation leakage stemming from protected areas. In 78.2% of documented leakage cases, reduced deforestation in protected areas was not sufficient to offset the amount of deforestation in 10 km buffer zones to a level that would be expected without protection. In 90.9% of leakage cases, the irreplaceability of species in the 10 km buffer zone was greater than that of the protected area, implying a negative impact of leakage on threatened species. Main conclusions The results suggest that protected areas are generally effective at preventing deforestation within their jurisdiction; however, leakage patterns can undermine conservation success because buffer zones often contain habitat for threatened species. We recommend accounting for the possibility of leakage when designing new protected areas and networks.

The world’s protected area network is constantly changing, and the dynamics of this network are tracked using the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA). This database evolved from a list of protected areas first mandated by the United Nations in 1959, and it now informs the key indicators that track progress toward area-based conservation targets. In this capacity, the WDPA illuminates the role of protected areas in advancing a range of international objectives and agreements, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite ongoing challenges in maintaining such a complex global dataset, the WDPA is continuously improving and taking advantage of new technology, making it widely applicable to diverse users, including those in sectors far from its original intended audience. In the future, the WDPA will expand to include areas that contribute to conservation and sustainable use outside of formal protected areas, and will increasingly link to other key global datasets. These innovations in the way the WDPA is managed and used will deliver vital knowledge to support a sustainable future for biodiversity and people globally.

•Biodiversity status of protected areas governed by indigenous peoples and local communities does not fit one standard formula•The contribution of local protected area governance is complementary to state governance•Community governed areas in Australia and Brazil show slower rate of forest loss than other protected area governance types and significantly larger mean size•Namibia’s community protected areas have higher terrestrial coverage and represent higher ecoregional protection equality than other governance types

Nations of the world have committed to a number of goals and targets to address global environmental challenges. Protected areas have for centuries been a key strategy in conservation and play a major role in addressing current challenges. The most important tool used to track progress on protected-area commitments is the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA). Periodic assessments of the world's protected-area estate show steady growth over the last 2 decades. However, the current method, which uses the latest version of the WDPA, does not show the true dynamic nature of protected areas over time and does not provide information on sites removed from the WDPA. In reality, this method can only show growth or remain stable. We used GIS tools in an approach to assess protected-area change over time based on 12 temporally distinct versions of the WDPA that quantify area added and removed from the WDPA annually from 2004 to 2016. Both the narrative of continual growth of protected area and the counter-narrative of protected area removal were overly simplistic. The former because growth was almost entirely in the marine realm and the latter because some areas removed were reprotected in later years. On average 2.5 million km(2) was added to the WDPA annually and 1.1 million km(2) was removed. Reasons for the inclusion and removal of protected areas in the WDPA database were in part due to data-quality issues but also to on-the-ground changes. To meet the 17% protected-area component of Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 by 2020, which stood at 14.7% in 2016, either the rate of protected-area removal must decrease or the rate of protected-area designation and addition to the WDPA must increase.

There are a multitude of biodiversity informatics projects, datasets, databases and initiatives at the global level, and many more at regional, national, and sometimes local levels. In such a complex landscape, it can be unclear how different elements relate to each other. Based on a high-level review of global and European-level elements, we present a map of the biodiversity informatics landscape. This is a first attempt at identifying key datasets/databases and data services, and mapping them in a way that can be used to identify the links, gaps and redundancies in the landscape. While the map is predominantly focused on elements with a global scope, the sub-global focus at the European-level was incorporated in the map in order to demonstrate how a regional network such as the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) can usefully contribute to connecting some of the nodes within the landscape. We identify 74 elements, and find that the informatics landscape is complex in terms of the characteristics and diversity of these elements, and that there is high variability in their level of connectedness. Overall, the landscape is highly connected, with one element boasting 28 connections. The average "degrees of separation" between elements is low, and the landscape is deemed relatively robust to failures since there is no single point that information flows through. Examples of possible effort duplication are presented, and the inclusion of five policy-level elements in the map helps illustrate how informatics products can contribute to global processes that define and direct political targets. Beyond simply describing the existing landscape, this map will support a better understanding of the landscape’s current structure and functioning, enabling responsible institutions to establish or strengthen collaborations, work towards avoiding effort duplication, and facilitate access to the biodiversity data, information and knowledge required to support effective decision-making, in the context of comparatively limited funding for biodiversity knowledge and conservation. To support this, we provide the input matrix and code that created this map as supplementary materials, so that readers can more closely examine the links in the landscape, and edit the map to suit their own purposes.