A proposition to establish a conservation area network for protecting fish assemblages in Hungary
Abstract
Biodiversity of freshwaters is declining at an alarming rate. For their protection a careful selection of conservation areas is urgently needed. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) approaches optimise the selection of planning units (the basic units of the conservation selection procedure, e.g subcatchments in freshwater systems) by minimising area and maximizing biodiversity representation. Recent applications of SCP to riverine systems give special attention to connectivity among river segments, subcatchments or catchments to select priority areas for conservation. We evaluated the importance of transboundary rivers to achieve conservation goals by systematically deleting some rivers from the prioritization procedure in Marxan and assessing the trade-offs between complexity of conservation recommendations and cost. To combine our solution for protecting freshwater ecosystems and the currently valid nature protection area network we found
that 13710 km2 is enough to protect terrestrial and riverine (fish) biodiversity in Hungary. Special attention is needed for the protection of some boundary rivers (Dráva, Ipoly) because these rivers contain many stricty riverine fishes of conservation concern.
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