Biospheres as Effective Conservation Measures – BECOME

BECOME will use UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) as model systems to understand how to manage synergies and trade-offs between conservation objectives and human development, through pluralistic and inclusive landscape-scale approaches to conservation. BECOME will take an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, combining diverse methodologies for evaluating effectiveness of BR management in supporting conservation and biocultural diversity. BECOME will harness existing data resources and infrastructure, including longitudinal governance and biodiversity data, to analyze BR effectiveness across temporal and spatial scales. The project will contribute to the implementation of global and national policy frameworks towards the conservation of biological diversity by generating actionable knowledge. The research design will specifically account for priority areas of the new post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
BECOME is uniquely positioned to perform much-needed longitudinal research on BR effectiveness across different metrics. BECOME will go beyond evaluating BR effectiveness through actors' self-evaluations, to help reduce bias and develop common methods to facilitate both compliance monitoring and adaptive management learning outcomes. BECOME will use existing data infrastructure to analyze changing trends in over 100 BRs worldwide whose management approaches have been followed for over 10 years, to understand changes in effectiveness. We will then harness big-data approaches to understand changes in land-use and modeled biodiversity change. The long-term monitoring of ecological and social variables performed in BECOME will help provide rare longitudinal trends related to social-ecological change and effectiveness of BRs. We will investigate the effectiveness of the zonation system as a combined “land-sharing” and “land-sparing” approach, to understand how this system supports biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of landscape resources.
In addition to longitudinal studies supported by governance and big-data infrastructure, we will use case studies to take a mixed-methods approach to evaluate management and context-dependent meanings and measures of BR success, both present and future. BECOME will explore the potential of combining intergenerational practice with participatory scenario planning, collaborating with BR stakeholders to explore desired futures in BRs which work for biodiversity and people. BECOME will work with stakeholders to capture and develop context-dependent but generalizable metrics which are adapted to BR objectives, facilitate the adaptive co-management learning feedback loop, and reflect synergies between conservation and development objectives. By evaluating both process and outcomes of BR implementation, BECOME will help to capture the complexity of social-ecological phenomena while encouraging learning through participatory transdisciplinary processes.