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19 - Policy drivers for peatland conservation
- from Part III - Socio-economic and political solutions to managing natural capital and peatland ecosystem services
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- By Rob Stoneman, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust UK, Clifton Bain, IUCN UK Peatland Programme, Scottish Wildlife Trust, UK, David Locky, Grant MacEwan University, Canada, Nick Mawdsley, Euroconsult Mott MacDonald, The Netherlands, Michael McLaughlan, Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment, Canada, Shashi Kumaran-Prentice, Charles Darwin University, Mark Reed, Newcastle University, UK, Vicki Swales, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), UK
- Edited by Aletta Bonn, Tim Allott, University of Manchester, Martin Evans, University of Manchester, Hans Joosten, Rob Stoneman
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- Book:
- Peatland Restoration and Ecosystem Services
- Published online:
- 05 June 2016
- Print publication:
- 23 June 2016, pp 375-401
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Summary
Introduction
Peatlands have long been recognised as a high priority for protection under international and national wildlife laws and agreements. Over the last half century this protection has essentially been reactionary in the face of more widespread land management policy and market forces, which have encouraged damage to peatlands. This damage has been mainly to support the delivery of provisioning services, such as food, timber and pulp, or the widespread extraction of peat and oil. Across the world, peatlands of different types face a variety of pressures from land use and land-use change as well as pollution (e.g. atmospheric pollution on British blanket bogs), making them more susceptible to impacts of climate change. Within the general framework of international agreements on peatland conservation, each country has developed its own approach to tackling the threats with varying degrees of success. While established wildlife conservation policy has helped limit the extent of damage to peatlands in some countries, there is a need and opportunity for a stronger and more urgent public policy response to address the significant ongoing losses of peatland biodiversity and ecosystem services. The recognition of the multiple benefits that peatlands provide has presented new avenues to support sustainably managed peatlands, in addition to reducing peatland loss through active restoration (e.g. Bain et al. 2011; Joosten, Tapio-Biström and Tol 2012). This chapter presents an overview of the principal international and national policy drivers, with examples from selected countries across the world to highlight how new resources could be directed at wise use and conservation of peatlands.
Global overview of policy drivers for peatland conservation
While peatlands have been regarded as wastelands, and areas to be ‘improved’ for agriculture and forestry since the late eighteenth century (Chapter 2), they are now recognised for their wildlife and increasingly for their ecosystem services. Peatlands, therefore, feature in some of the world's highest-level environmental policies.
One of the earliest global agreements to recognise the importance of peatlands for protection was the Ramsar Convention (1971) that promoted the establishment and management of a network of protected wetlands. In 1996, it was reported that though peatlands represented 50% of the world's freshwater and terrestrial wetlands, less than 10% of the designated Ramsar sites had peatland as their dominant habitat (Chapter 15). Given continuing peatland loss and degradation, Contracting Parties set out guidelines to improve peatland protection (Ramsar 2003).
Habitat use by stream-breeding frogs in south-east Sulawesi, with some preliminary observations on community organization
- Graeme R. Gillespie, David Lockie, Michael P. Scroggie, Djoko T. Iskandar
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- Journal:
- Journal of Tropical Ecology / Volume 20 / Issue 4 / July 2004
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 07 July 2004, pp. 439-448
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- Article
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The habitat associations of stream-breeding frogs were examined along a series of stream transects on Buton Island in south-east Sulawesi, Indonesia. Of the eight frog species located along streams, four were observed breeding in stream habitats. We examined spatial habitat partitioning among these species. Three of the four species were found to be associated with a non-random selection of the available perch sites. Strong partitioning between species in habitat associations was found; partitioning of the available habitat space was primarily associated with differences in proximity to stream features, and in the height of perch sites. General observations indicated that oviposition sites of most species were associated with the microhabitats in which the adult frogs were found. All four stream-breeding species appear to have synchronous breeding phenologies and the spatial relationships of these species within the habitat space appear to reflect partitioning of calling sites and oviposition sites. The stream-breeding frog community in this region of Sulawesi has much lower species richness and less specialized habitat use compared with other tropical stream-breeding frog communities in the region.