Andres Etter

Safeguarding biodiversity and human well-being depends on sustaining ecosystems. Global agreements, such as the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and UN Sustainable Development Goals, aim to halt and reverse loss and degradation of ecosystems, associated biodiversity and ecosystem services. They require standardised information for quantifying where ecosystem loss and degradation is occurring, and where action can most effectively mitigate its impacts. Two global standards developed to quantify ecosystem changes are: 1) the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) protocol for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse; and 2) the United Nations System for Environmental Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), which tracks change in ecosystem assets and their contributions to the economy and human well-being. In this paper, we explore the similarities between the frameworks, identifying common concepts, models and data, and highlight differences in their conceptual framings ...

Las cifras y temáticas contenidos en el presente Reporte, aunque no son el panorama completo del estado del conocimiento de la biodiversidad en Colombia, son un compendio seleccionado de los temas que, desde el Instituto Humboldt, consideramos son relevantes y merecen ser discutidos por el público general. En muchos de los casos, las cifras no son esperanzadoras u son un llamado urgente a la acción. En otro casos son la evidencia de que se requieren acciones a nivel nacional, y más allá de esto, son muchas las iniciativas que están germinando desde los territorios, cada vez desde una mayor variedad de actores.Bogotá, D. C., Colombi

La Lista Roja de Ecosistemas (LRE) proporciona un nuevo estándar unificado de carácter global, desarrollado por la UICN (Union Internacional de Conservación de la Naturaleza), cuyo propósito es orientar procesos de evaluación de riesgo que sean comparables y compatibles, acerca del estado de todos los ecosistemas del mundo, que pueda ser aplicado de manera coherente desde el nivel global, hasta los niveles regional, nacional o local. Esta metodología permite valorar y comparar la situación de riesgo de los ecosistemas, según criterios cuantitativos estandarizados, para por ejemplo hacer seguimiento de la efectividad de cumplimiento de acuerdos o políticas, o prever los riesgos e impactos de futuros proyectos de desarrollo. Aquí presentamos una primera evaluación nacional de los ecosistemas terrestres continentales de Colombia aplicando esta metodología, con el fin de aportar a la orientación de la planificación ambiental del país.

A growing population with increasing consumption of milk and dairy require more agricultural output in the coming years, which potentially competes with forests and other natural habitats. This issue is particularly salient in the tropics, where deforestation has traditionally generated cattle pastures and other commodity crops such as corn and soy. The purpose of this article is to review the concepts and discussion associated with reconciling food production and conservation, and in particular with regards to cattle production, including the concepts of land-sparing and land-sharing. We then present these concepts in the specific context of Colombia, where there are efforts to increase both cattle production and protect tropical forests, in order to discuss the potential for landscape planning for sustainable cattle production. We outline a national planning approach, which includes disaggregating the diverse cattle sector and production types, identifying biophysical, and economi...

Landscape connectivity is essential in biodiversity conservation because of its ability to reduce the effect of habitat fragmentation; furthermore is a key property in adapting to climate change. Potential distribution models and landscape connectivity studies have increased with regard to their utility to prioritizing areas for conservation. The objective of this study was to model the potential distribution of Mountain cloud forests in the Transversal Volcanic System, Michoacán and to analyze the role of these areas in maintaining landscape connectivity. Potential distribution was modeled for the Mountain cloud forests based on the maximum entropy approach using 95 occurrence points and 17 ecological variables at 30 m spatial resolution. Potential connectivity was then evaluated by using a probability of connectivity index based on graph theory. The percentage of variation (dPCk) was used to identify the individual contribution of each potential area of Mountain cloud forests in o...

The expansion and intensification of the land use change through conversions from natural ecosystems to pastures, croplands and plantations, and changes of use in areas that are already occupied, have generated some alterations in soil properties. The oil palm plantation has taken a high importance for biodiesel production and other products, and Colombia is the fourth country in the world with more potential for the palm oil production. In this study, with the objective of determine the effect of the oil palm plantation on the infiltration, bulk density and the organic carbon content of the soil, these properties were compared between a pasture under grazing during 40 years and three lots of an oil palm plantation that are 30, 19 and 9 years old, all located in a same soil unit. In the oil palm lots were taken into account the distinction of results in the palm avenues (used for the transport of fruits and the dispersion of fertilizers) and in the piles of pruned fronds (used for t...

ABSTRACT El presente documento compila los resultados del análisis y evaluación de los procesos de deforestación en Colombia. El capítulo I presenta una revisión general de la literatura nacional e internacional para identificar los principales determinantes de los procesos de transformación de los ecosistemas de bosque tropical colombiano. En el capítulo II se lleva a cabo una síntesis de las principales revisiones de literatura disponibles en el tema de modelos empleados para caracterizar y proyectar la transformación de los bosques, analizando las alternativas metodológicas más pertinentes para el caso colombiano y los proyectos REDD. En el capítulo III se evalúan los resultados del ejercicio de modelación y de la proyección espacial de la deforestación en Colombia, obtenidos a partir del uso de diferentes herramientas metodológicas y del trabajo a diferentes escalas espaciotemporales. Finalmente, el capítulo IV contiene un conjunto de recomendaciones para mejorar, a partir de la optimización del proceso de modelación, la elaboración de escenarios de referencia, escenarios de emisiones y líneas base para la implementación de proyectos REDD en Colombia.

Transformación de los paisajes tropicales en América Latina Evaluando las tendencias e implicaciones de políticas para REDD+ Pablo Pacheco1, Mariel Aguilar-Støen2, Jan Börner1, Andres Etter3, Louis Putzel1 y María del Carmen Vera Díaz4 1 Centro para la Investigación ...

As the United Nations develops a post-2020 global biodiversity framework for the Convention on Biological Diversity, attention is focusing on how new goals and targets for ecosystem conservation might serve its vision of ‘living in harmony with nature’1,2. Advancing dual imperatives to conserve biodiversity and sustain ecosystem services requires reliable and resilient generalizations and predictions about ecosystem responses to environmental change and management3. Ecosystems vary in their biota4, service provision5 and relative exposure to risks6, yet there is no globally consistent classification of ecosystems that reflects functional responses to change and management. This hampers progress on developing conservation targets and sustainability goals. Here we present the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Ecosystem Typology, a conceptually robust, scalable, spatially explicit approach for generalizations and predictions about functions, biota, risks and ...

David A. Keith, Jose R. Ferrer, Emily Nicholson, Melanie J. Bishop, Beth A. Polidoro, Eva RamirezLlodra, Mark G. Tozer, Jeanne L. Nel, Ralph Mac Nally, Edward J. Gregr, Kate E. Watermeyer, Franz Essl, Don Faber-Langendoen, Janet Franklin, Caroline E. R. Lehmann, Andres Etter, Dirk J. Roux, Jonathan S. Stark, Jessica A. Rowland, Neil A. Brummitt, Ulla C. Fernandez-Arcaya, Iain M. Suthers, Susan K. Wiser, Ian Donohue, Leland J. Jackson, R. Toby Pennington, Nathalie Pettorelli, Angela Andrade, Tytti Kontula, Arild Lindgaard, Teemu Tahvanainan, Aleks Terauds, Oscar Venter, James E. M. Watson, Michael A Chadwick, Nicholas J. Murray, Justin Moat, Patricio Pliscoff, Irene Zager, Richard T. Kingsford

Recent global initiatives in ecosystem restoration offer an unprecedented opportunity to improve biodiversity conservation and human health and well-being. Ecosystems form a core component of biodiversity. They provide humans with multiple benefits – a stable climate and breathable air; water, food and materials; and protection from disaster and disease. Ecosystem restoration, as defined by the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, includes a range of management interventions that aim to reduce impacts on and assist in the recovery of ecosystems that have been damaged, degraded or destroyed. This Guide promotes the application of the science of ecosystem risk assessment, which involves measuring the risk of ecosystem collapse, in ecosystem restoration. It explores how the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems and ecosystem restoration can be jointly deployed to reduce risk of ecosystem collapse.

The Land Restitution Program (LRP) is one of the greatest challenges for Colombia’s post-conflict period; it implies the recognition of the victims of dispossession or abandonment of lands and sets the discussion for future land use planning in these areas. The 1,119,959 Ha of LRP areas (August 2018) require knowledge of their state to promote land uses that favor the conservation of priority ecosystems and forest cover. Spatial and statistical analyzes where used to study the land-cover change in and around LRP areas at the national and regional level. An index of naturalness using a multi-criteria framework was used to identify important areas for conservation. Within areas, forest cover changes, resulting from deforestation and regeneration processes, decreased between 1990 and 2017. A total of 9.4% of their area show high naturalness, while 20% of them show high importance for conservation. The results show that, despite their dispossession/abandonment, these areas continued a d...

The broad aim of this study is, to contribute to a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the patterns, processes and drivers of unplanned land cover change in the tropics, using Colombia as a study case. Land cover change is an important global issue because of the expanding ecological footprint of a rapidly increasing human population and per capita level of resource consumption. This has a major impact on natural ecosystems and their function at the local (hundreds of square kilometers) and global scales. The understanding of extent and rate of land cover change is an important issue confronting biodiversity conservation, land use planning, protected area management, and global climate change analysis. Tropical deforestation is the major source of global land cover change, with the highest absolute rates occurring in South America, especially in the Brazilian Amazon, where government planning is an important driver of deforestation. However, unplanned deforestation for cropping and ranching is also occurring in Colombia. This is of international concern because Colombia’s diverse ecosystems support high levels of species richness and endemism. Improving the understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns and drivers ofland cover change (both deforestation and regeneration) is an important step in developing planning and conservation strategies to address this problem. I applied a spatial and temporal statistical modelling approach to predict changes in land cover in Colombia at the local (100 km2), regional (104 km2) and national (106 km2) levels, with a timeframe spanning from decades to centuries. As dependant variable data, binary forest/non-forest data are used. Explanatory variables comprise biophysical and socioeconomic data sourced from a broad range of information sources, including remotely sensed data from aerial photographs and satellite images, secondary sources of biophysical and socioeconomic data, and historical data. At the local-level, I addressed the deforestation process over the last 60 years using six case studies of 100 km2 of humid lowland forests, by applying logistic regression and spatial analysis. At the regional-level, I studied the deforestation in the Caqueta colonization front of the Colombian Amazon region from 1988-2004 by applying a forest-cover zoning method and logistic regression models to predict deforestation and forest regeneration from biophysical and socio-economic explanatory variables. At the national level, I quantified and analysed patterns and drivers of land cover change over the past 500 years for key periods of Colombian history, and identified the extent and duration of impacts on broad ecosystem types. At the national and regional-levels, I also modelled current landscape transformation patterns and predicted areas at a high risk of future deforestation using a joint logistic regression and regression tree approach. I discovered that the rate of deforestation across several lowland regions of Colombia follows a simple sigmoid pattern composed of four phases of transformation: an initial phase of gradual forest loss; an intermediate phase of rapid loss; a second intermediate phase where the rate of decline slows; and a final phase where the forest loss stabilises and is balanced by forest regeneration creating a dynamic equilibrium. At the end of this final phase, the landscape is in a highly transformed state with forest cover stabilizing at 2 to 10% of the original extent and an average forest patch size of 15.4 (± 9.2) ha. As a general rule, the transformed landscape will have two forest components: a stable component of remnant mature tropical forests, and a dynamic component of secondary forests of different ages that is repeatedly cleared. A second important discovery was that unplanned deforestation in the Colombian Amazon moves as a colonisation wave, extending from population centres. The rate of movement was 0.84 km.yr-1 between 1989 and 2002. The regional average annual deforestation rate was 2.6%, but varied locally between –1.8% (regeneration) and 5.3%. The parallel deforestation and regeneration processes operating within the colonization front showed consistent patterns and rates directly related to the proportion of forest in the neighbourhood, with the highest rates of deforestation occurring in the areas with intermediate (40-60%) forest cover, following an overall quadratic function, and therefore confirming the sigmoid pattern across an entire colonization front. Landscapes with intermediate forest cover also have the highest density of edge habitat, with the deforestation process mimicking the spread of disease. At the national-level, the study reveals two important outcomes. First, there are significant regional differences in the spatial and temporal patterns and drivers of land cover change. The importance of such regional differences in factors explainingland cover change is highlighted by the greatest discrimination…

... of Fire and Rainfall Variability on Tree Structure and Carbon Fluxes in Savannas: Application of the Flames Model Adam Liedloff and ... Fires were simulated as elliptical fires typical of the unconstrained landscape fires burning in northern Australia (Catchpole et al., 1992), where ...