Socio-ecological gap analysis to forecast species range contractions for conservation

Conservation requires both a needs assessment and prioritization scheme for planning and implementation. Range maps are critical for understanding and conserving biodiversity, but current range maps often omit content, negating important metrics of variation in populations and places. Here, we integrate a myriad of conditions that are spatially explicit across distributions of carnivores to identify gaps in capacity necessary for their conservation. Expanding on traditional gap analyses that focus almost exclusively on quantifying discordance in protected area coverage across a species’ range, our work aggregates threat layers (e.g., drought, human pressures) with resources layers (e.g., protected areas, cultural diversity) to identify gaps in available conservation capacity (ACC) across ranges for 91 African carnivores. Our model indicated that all species have some portion of their range at risk of contraction, with an average of 15 percentage range loss. We found that the ACC differe..., We obtained a species list from the IUCN Red List of 91 extant terrestrial African carnivores excluding Otariidae and Phocidae species. Threat layers included human modification, drought, and hunting pressure. Resource layers included habitat, protected area, biodiversity, and cultural diversity (Table S3). Because the spatial data obtained for threat and resource variables varied widely in format, resolution and spatial projection, we completed several pre-processing steps prior to analysis that depended on the format of the data. Data stored as polygons (e.g., PA) were processed to be represented in a numerical raster format, specifying the cell size of the output to be 5km2. The dataset of threat and resource variables had a wide range of values including continuous and binary classification. To facilitate comparison and calculation of the available conservation capacity index, all variables were normalized to scale from 0-1. To achieve this, we clipped each resource and threat raste..., Files include Microsoft Word and Excel files as well as TIFF raster files for ArcMap, Google Earth Engine, or QGIS