One of the easiest and most popular ways to protect a natural environment is transform it into a protected area. It may seem trivial (if you prevent man from putting his hand to an ecosystem, this is better), to the point that it is often thought that it is enough to protect an area to save it, but the situation, as a study published on explains well Current Biologyis infinitely more complicated: it state of the surrounding areas to protected ones is equally importantand if you use them too much, the advantages of protection vanish.
The importance of the neighborhood. The study of North Carolina State University was conducted in China, where the team, thanks to the use of phototrappole, analyzed the situation in hundreds of protected areas scattered throughout the country. The first and most important conclusion of this analysis is far from positive: where the protected areas are surrounded by too populated areas, the protection is not enough: the ecosystem still undergoes a loss of biodiversity.
This loss usually begins with great predators. The study focuses in particular on the tigers, who need a very large territory to thrive: therefore it is not enough to protect a small area to help them. The problem, in fact, is all that is around us, and the concept of “matrix”: these are all those areas of passage between one protected area and the other, and that large carnivores like tigers use to cover great distances.
Not areas, but goals. The study explains that the matrices are as important as the protected areas themselves: when they are too densely populated, or deforested, the tigers and the other apical predators struggle to use them to move, and therefore remain confined to a limited territory. The team discovered that large predators disappeared from 84% of the monitored areas, with an evident correlation between their absence and the degree of urban development of the surrounding areas.
Obviously, The disappearance of large predators from protected areas causes a series of consequences to the entire ecosystem. For this reason, the study warns against considering simple protection a definitive solution: we should begin to review our approach to conservation and create real networks of protected areas, connected to each other and in which, perhaps, reintroduce predatory species that have now disappearedto start the regeneration of the entire ecosystem.
