The PhD student who led the study, Santiago Schauman, used the same global database of protected land that the United Nations depends on for tracking conservation. He and his colleagues analyzed 200,000 shapes, determining how much protected land is a certain distance from the border. “Ecologists are wary of oddly shaped protected areas because they have more edges where nature and humans collide,” Stevens wrote. But there is another angle that Schauman’s study and Stevens’ article did not consider: the proximity to other protected areas. St. Croix 360 published the above map in 2022, along with an analysis of some of these issues.

Source: Washington Post February 23, 2024 19:59 UTC