The recently conducted study demonstrated numerous cases of serious infraction of the legal land-use regime within protected areas (PAs) in Ukraine. Moreover, even privatization of lands within Ukrainian PAs has been detected.
This conclusion has been made by NGO ecologists based on documents analysis and field observations of the nature reserves, and that was combined with spatial comparison of PAs’ maps, and private lands of the Public Land Cadaster Map of Ukraine. The model plots survey took place in the Kyiv Oblast, which is a province in the Central Ukraine.
In this regard, BioModel plans to modify regionally a standard land-use change simulation rules concerning PAs in Ukraine. So, we plan to set special elasticity indices within PAs instead of the interpreting protected areas mask in CLUEs as “no change mask”.
We also recommend to other modellers to use these new updates matched Ukraine when setting the rules of land-use change simulation in CLUEs model (or similar) for the land-use change and pressure-based biodiversity modeling purposes.
Note: the territory of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus was named as “GLOBIO Ukraine” in the GLOBIO regional network.
2 Comments
Wilbert van Rooij · Tuesday February 5th, 2013 at 03:49 PM
Interesting alternative for regular approach. Excluding PA’s is often not realistic in several developing countries all over the world.
How are elasticies determined? Based on adjusting historical input to match current situation?
Grygoriy Kolomytsev · Thursday February 7th, 2013 at 01:08 PM
IMHO, for determining elasticity or including PAs as variable (as Carlos mentioned) historical review is an asset.