Quantifying the role of protected areas for safeguarding the uses of biodiversity

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are one of the main strategies to protect biodiversity and its ecosystem services globally. Plants are a critical component of biodiversity, playing a key role in almost every aspect of life, and Fabaceae is the third most diverse plant family worldwide with many useful species. We evaluated the diversity of uses of Fabaceae, how much of this diversity is encompassed by the Argentina's PAs network, and the relationship between species' conservation status and their uses. To do so, we used literature review, species distribution models (SDM), diversity metrics of use, conservation status, and gap analysis. We found that 72% of species (520) had at least one reported use. Prosopis species were the taxa with the most uses. Environmental, Medicine, and Animal food were the most diverse use classes. PAs with low to medium species richness supported the highest proportion of species with uses, and in regions, with higher species richness, the redundancy of uses increased. Most of the Fabaceae species from Argentina provide a valuable resource for people and animals, and fortunately, many of these uses are represented in PAs network. However, all use classes have between 8 and 25% of their species threatened, and most species (548) did not achieve conservation targets, highlighting the need for conservation efforts to safeguard these species. We demonstrated that integrating different species characteristics, data sources, and diversity metrics is an effective way to evaluate the contribution of PAs to conserve the utilitarian aspects of biodiversity on a large-scale.