Raísa Vieira, a visitor to, and collaborator with, the Conservation Planning Group, has recently published some important findings on Brazilian protected areas. Her national terrestrial analysis showed that Brazil’s rather high percentage of overall reservation (18%) is skewed strongly toward the Amazon biome. In the nation’s other biomes, not only do reserves cover much smaller percentages of land area, but they are biased toward land with little potential for intensive uses and, to some extent, toward steeper slopes. This new paper adds to the growing number of quantitative studies around the world that have documented residual trends in reservation. The implications for global biodiversity are serious, and call for new approaches to setting priorities for protection and measuring progress in nature conservation.

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