Biodiversity conservation gaps in Brazil: A role for systematic conservation planning

A recent study aimed to estimate the biodiversity conservation gaps of the Brazilian protected area network by analysing more than 880 thousand records of species presence from online databases. Although we agree with its general message that Protected Areas are poorly known, unevenly distributed, and not sufficient to safeguard the Brazilian biodiversity, we question its methodological approach and feel that its conclusions must not be received uncritically. A major concern is that their analyses are based on an arbitrary set of widespread, abundant, and non-threatened species and on a subset of the species widely recognized as conservation priorities, such as the red-listed species. Furthermore, they question the efficiency of the Brazilian protected area network based only on species data, missing other facets of biodiversity, such as habitat/community diversity, ecosystem processes, and services. We point out that the adequate way to estimate the Brazilian conservation gaps and to properly indicate where they are in space is through systematic conservation planning. Official data indicate that spatial conservation gaps correspond to 16.5% of the Brazilian territory, being conservation Priority Areas not under Protected Areas. This spatial gap, however, is much smaller in Amazon in comparison to all other biomes. For the Caatinga drylands, we estimated three facets of the conservation gap (i.e., qualitative gap, target gap, and spatial gap). We highlight that the Brazilian protected area network has been very successful to safeguard many facets of the Brazilian biodiversity and that future expansions, based on systematic conservation planning, can efficiently protect elected biodiversity traits.