FRESHWATER CONSERVATION PLANNING: A SYSTEMATIC VIEW

CASUAL SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION

Although freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity are in urgent need of protection, there has been little emphasis on declaring protected areas for the primary purpose of conserving freshwater biodiversity. Instead, uninformed opportunism has reigned, whereby conservation of freshwater ecosystems has remained peripheral to conservation goals developed for terrestrial ecosystems. To be effective for freshwater conservation, protected areas must consider some particularities of freshwater ecosystems, such as the importance of connectivity at maintaining natural processes or facilitating the propagation of threats, and seasonality in their dynamics. In this talk I will synthesise recent progress in the application of systematic conservation planning approaches to freshwater systems and demonstrate how the design of protected areas can be enhanced to address the particularities of these systems.

Virgilio Hermoso is a Research Fellow at the Catalan Forest Institute (Solsona, Lleida) funded by the Spanish Government under the Ramon y Cajal Program. His research career is centred on the study of ecology and management of freshwater ecosystems. His main interests are in improving our knowledge on how perturbations affect freshwater biodiversity, identifying the key factors behind its decline and proposing cost-effective ways for addressing its conservation through novel approaches. Over the last 8 years, Virgilio has focused on developing new methods to address the specific needs of freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity through systematic conservation planning. He is also interested in the ecology of freshwater fish, which was the focus of his PhD that he completed in 2008 at the University of Huelva (Spain).

[Host: Ana Filipa Filipe, Applied Ecology]

Image credits: Ana Filipa Filipe