Improving biodiversity conservation with expansion of protected area network in Iran, systematic conservation planning applying Zonation algorithm

Designation of protected areas is the most important action in conservation of biodiversity. Previous Ad hoc methods and focusing on charismatic species resulted in unrepresentative networks of protected areas. To compensate this problem systematic conservation planning is introduced and applied. Nearly, 10 percent of Iran is designated as protected areas that should be added up to 17% until 2020, as suggested by UNEP. Therefore, we applied Zonation conservation prioritization algorithm to introduce new high priority areas to be added to the current network. We chose 36 endemic and globally threatened enlisted in IUCN red list mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians as surrogate species. We developed maximum entropy modeling on surrogates to develop habitat suitability models. Zonation approach was applied with all of the three cell removal rules of additive benefit function (ABF), core area zonation (CAZ) and Target based planning (TBP). The current area network was included in all the rules. Selection of the 20% of country area with highest conservation rank based on each rule lead to increase of species habitat conservation by an average of 16%. The ABF is the most efficient rule with conservation of 34.98% of surrogate habitats on average in comparison with CAZ (28.74%) and TBP (31.1%).