The relevance of Spatial Analysis in Environmental Conservation Approaches: Systematic Conservation Planning and Ecosystem Services.

Achieving conservation targets for sustainable development has been one of society’s greatest challenges, a result chiefly of the varied stakeholders that make use of natural resources. In this context, environmental conservation approaches such as Systematic Conservation Planning and ecosystem services have become increasingly popular as feasible solutions for the allocation, delimitation and management of protected areas. These approaches, often used to drive public policies based on payment for environmental services, have highlighted the intrinsic relationships between geography and spatial analysis, as they rely on space-time processes and multidisciplinary concepts for the analysis of the biophysical, social and economic variables used to quantify and map the natural capital and ecosystem services present in a given territory. The work developed here is part of the PhD thesis of Ulises Rodrigo Magdalena, who relates Systematic Conservation Planning methodological practices with the Ecosystem Services approach. The author also exposes how these environmental conservation approaches are related to Geography through Spatial Analysis. In the e-poster presentation, the objective was to expose that the environmental conservation approaches used in scientific research and in decision-making institutes related to delimitation of protected areas are closely related to Geography because they present a temporal and spatial perspective, are associated to spatial modeling and embark several paradigms of Spatial Analysis.