Breizh5_KeyBiodiversityAreas

<b>Object: Process and map Key Biodiversity Areas for the Brittany Region</b>Funded by European Horizon 2020 program within Marie-Sklodowska Curie n 899546, the TEKBreiz project aimed at starting to map out the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Breton landscape to support climate-resilient food-system planning and decision-making.Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) are becoming the international standard to identify essential ecological areas. “By providing the precise location of places that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity, KBAs can accelerate efforts to reverse the loss of nature, by ensuring conservation efforts are focused in the places that matter most, and by enabling entities that may have negative impacts on nature to avoid or reduce those impacts in the places they would be most damaging". This data is released by the Integrated Biodiversity Assessement Tool (IBAT) at https://www.keybiodiversityareas.org/<b>Processing</b>:Downloaded KBA dataset from source for FranceClipped geography by Historical Brittany (5 departments) boundariesCleaned and exported layerAnalyzed patterns<b>Limitations:</b>While the goal of the KBAs is to become a worldwide standard for key areas according to a wide variety of criteria (11) including threatened biodiversity, geographically restricted biodiversity, ecological integrity, biological processes, and irreplaceability, in practice sites are synchronized nationally by subcommittees and then transmitted to IUCN for review and integration (See more details at https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/46259). What happens is that most sites currently come from previous datasets featuring Important bird areas and do not contain all sites fitting the aforementioned criteria. This information was obtained by discussing methodology with the KBA global team. This means that there is a current gap between what the KBA DB aspires to be versus what it currently is. For the Brittany Region, we can see that KBA are mostly limited to coastal sites, which is congruent with Important Bird Areas. This layer is useful to look at for Brittany because we can see that polygon extents encompass most of the coastal line, highlighting the need to protect our coastal resources and ecosystems, which has great implications for sea-related activities.However the current limitations of the source dataset point at the need for more work incorporating Breton Key Biodiversity Sites into the global dataset, for instance data coming from within "Argoat"/inland country.<br><br><br>