Change the IUCN protected area categories to reflect biodiversity outcomes

Abstract

In 1872, United States President Ulysses Grant set aside 2.2 million acres of wilderness, primarily for recreational purposes, as the first formally recognized protected area (PA)—Yellowstone National Park. The concept took hold slowly over the next hundred years, and PAs are now recognized as essential to biodiversity conservation [1] and as irreplaceable tools for species and habitat management and recovery. Today, over 100,000 sites (11.5% of the Earth’s land surface) are listed in the World Database on Protected Areas [2]. PAs have always been recognized as having broad roles, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) included the role of conserving biodiversity in its definition: “An area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means” [3].