Spatial analysis guiding decision making in environmental conservation: Systematic conservation planning and ecosystem services

I Introduction

Geography has matured as a field of study in various ways over time; one important such breakthrough was the “quantitative revolution,” brought upon by improvements in geospatial analysis and the consequent development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools. The latter have become a de facto standard for the creation, management, manipulation, and visualization of geographic data in several disciplines (Murray, 2010, 2020).

Spatial analysis and geographers have made significant contributions (both directly and indirectly) to a number of approaches to environmental conservation, including Systematic Conservation Planning and ecosystem services, by offering new paradigms for analyses. These contributions can be found, among others, in the constant data sources that are now available for the definition of biophysical, social, and economic variables, as well as in novel tools for the delimitation of nature elements and innovations in the spatial data modeling required for the simulation of landscapes—all crucial for researchers seeking to develop scenarios for the measurement of performance against sustainable development targets (Li and Heap, 2014).

Technological advances in the quantification of energy on the Earth’s surface and improvements in data processing/storage devices have led to a steady influx of new and improved spatial analysis methodologies (Li and Heap, 2014; Manhães et al., 2016). This influx of new techniques has enhanced geographic perspectives of environmental phenomena, processes, and conflicts around areas that are representative of the key features of an ecosystem or habitat found in a given territory.

One important way through which one can design spatial strategies to protect “ecosystem services,” that is, the direct and indirect benefits humans can obtain from ecosystems (West, 2015), is the use of Systematic Conservation Planning (Manhães et al., 2016; Villarreal-Rosas et al., 2020). Its use can be problematic, however, because Systematic Conservation Planning must be analyzed from a temporal perspective, while ecosystem services require analysis from a spatial perspective. To resolve this contradiction, these approaches rely heavily on spatial analysis, which aims to investigate spatial arrangements, space-time processes, and spatial predictions (Ferreira, 2014). In other words, spatial analysis comprises the analysis, temporal observation, and spatial prediction of a certain configuration of land and marine objects, as represented either by lines, points and polygons or a surface of continuous values. Spatial Analysis is closely associated with Geography, and provides researchers with a synthesis, in a precise, ordered, and reactive manner, of how the interconnectedness and multiplicity of phenomena on the Earth’s surface translates into arrangements and distributions of specific areas (Berry, 1964; Hartshorne, 1978).

In light of the above, this manuscript sought to outline the importance and contribution of spatial analysis as a geographic perspective for two conservation approaches, namely Systematic Conservation Planning and ecosystem services. We approached the topic hereof in the following sequence: (i) an introduction to readers of protected areas (with specific reference to the Brazilian context) and the factors that influence them; (ii) the environmental conservation approaches used for allocation and delimitation of protected areas and their features, limitations, and definitions; and (iii) the correlations of ecosystem services and Systematic Conservation Planning with spatial analysis, with a presentation of its paradigms, advances, and contributions as well as the importance of this field of study for environmental studies in general.

II Protected areas

Protected areas are a key tool in the management and preservation of biodiversity and ecosystems. Their categories are based on a combination of different targets outlined in international treaties and constitutional laws in many countries (Fauchald, 2021; Lausche, 2011). Even though protected areas are the responsibility of each national sovereignty, countries have increasingly taken part in international treaties for joint preservation efforts because they understand that the environment is a “common patrimony for all” and that the biodiversity loss is linked around the globe (Lausche, 2011).

Although there is progress in establishing protected areas, there are still concerns about the effectiveness of international treaties, because these commitments have not yet been able to reverse the trends of biodiversity loss and ecosystem functions at local and global scales (Birben, 2019). According to the Protected Planet Report 2020 (UNEP-WCMC; IUCN; and NGS, 2018) since the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010, ∼ 21 million km² has been declared as protected areas around the world, where ∼ 2.1 million km² represents land and inland water ecosystems and 18.8 million km² marine ecosystems. However, the data show that the “Aichi Target 11’s” goal has not been met yet. So far, only 16.64% of protected areas in terrestrial ecosystems and 7.74% in marine ecosystems have been achieved, whereas the global target would be to totally preserve 17% of the terrestrial ecosystems and 10% of the marine ecosystems in 10 years (2010–2020) (UNEP-WCMC; IUCN; and NGS, 2018).

The deficit to meet the Aichi Target 11 can be described as something positive given that, along the decade, there were different difficulties to have declared an area as protected. For instance, in many scenarios, the Aichi Target 11 was divergent with the economic and political interests of each country. For example, the political management of the United States of America, from 2016 to 2020, has broken up with The Paris Agreement and also changed several environmental laws making it difficult to implement, manage, and maintain protected areas in the territory.

Brazil, another example, although recognized for its robustness in environmental policy, also carried out changes to comply with the minimum of environmental preservation targets. The recent deterioration of Brazilian environmental conservation public policies is alarming. This is traced back to the reformulation of the Forest Code approved in 2012, which changed the criteria for protected areas and eliminated then-existing protected area categories (Soares-filho et al., 2014; Soares-Filho and Rajão, 2018). This deconstruction has had a number of effects, chiefly among which the gradual but constant loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, including provisioning, regulating, and cultural services (Moraes, 2019), as well as the creation of protected areas whose limits were defined based on aesthetic criteria, ignoring issues like low natural soil fertility and high relief slope indices (Pressey et al., 2002; Soares-filho et al., 2014).

Brazil has 1743 protected areas classified into three conservation categories: restricted use, sustainable use, and indigenous lands (Oliveira et al., 2017). These areas are governed by Federal Law 9985/2000, which established the National System of Nature Conservation Units (SNUC), and by Federal Decree 1775/1996, which regulates the procedure for demarcation of indigenous lands. In general, these areas are divided into “Conservation Units” or “Indigenous Lands” and their creation follows a number of requirements, such as the need to prepare and implement a management plan for the management of their natural and cultural resources. As a rule, management of these is areas the responsibility of public institutions, but there are cases in which they are governed by the private sector as well.

That said, Brazil has protected areas of other types than those classified by Oliveira et al. (2017). These areas, of restricted use, are called Permanent Preservation Areas and Legal Reserve areas, and are governed by Federal Law 12,651/2012 (i.e., Forest Code). The difference between these laws lies in their purpose. Although the aim for the protected area types described by Oliveira et al. (2017) is to preserve nature and indigenous culture on federal lands, Federal Law No. 12,651/2012 aims to protect vegetation as well as to exploit, supply, and control forest resources on agricultural lands.

Defining the criteria for demarcation and inspection of protected areas governed by Brazilian Federal Law 12,651/2012 is the responsibility of public institutions, but the effectiveness of the demarcation itself, as well as the implementation and management of these protected areas, are left at the discretion of the landowner. This creates a limitation for the quantification of the total size of protected areas in Brazil, despite the efforts by the National Rural Environmental Registry System to catalog Permanent Preservation Areas and Legal Reserves.

Explaining the different governing laws involved helps us better understand some overlaps, relationships, or transformations between protected area categories. For instance, it is worth noting that Indigenous Lands sometimes overlap with Conservation Units. Also, Conservation Units may hold Permanent Preservation Areas within them, due to the criteria in Federal Law 12,651/2012, but the opposite does not happen.

Despite these differentiations, it can be said in general that protected areas around the world are geographically defined spaces, recognized and managed through legal instruments, created in order to conserve nature over time, including its associated ecosystem services and cultural values (Mitchell et al., 2018). That said, many of these areas are hindered in their ability to achieve this purpose by two relevant factors: (1) conflicts over land use; and (2) the allocation and spatial arrangement of protected areas. The former, as one can surmise from the name, is the result of the illegal appropriation of protected areas for the exploitation of natural resources, land grabbing, or attempts to consolidate expansions of the agricultural frontier. Instabilities and political discourse have further increased this movement (Cavalett, 2018; Kröger, 2019; Rochedo et al., 2018), triggering intense deforestation that intensifies and prolongs anthropic actions and natural processes such as forest fires and water stresses (Fearnside, 2016; Ferrante and Fearnside, 2019; Magnusson et al., 2018).

For instance, in the summer of 2014, for 45 days, the southeast region of Brazil experienced a natural atmospheric phenomenon called atmospheric blocking that prevented the entry of moisture from the Amazon rainforest through the Low Level Jets (LLJ), the formation of the South Atlantic Convergence Zone (SACZ) and the passage of cold fronts (Marengo et al., 2015; Marengo and Alves, 2015; Nobre et al., 2016). As a consequence of this phenomenon, a long period of water stress occurred in 2015 that reinforced the argument that decreased rates of water retention in soil are due to the removal of vegetation, which reduced the supply of the water table and, in turn, significantly affected flow rates in the dry season (Balbinot et al., 2009; Tucci et al., 1997; Zimale et al., 2017). The effects of deforestation also contributed to the high rate of forest fires in the Amazon rainforest region in 2019, causing the appearance of a regional-scale plume of smoke large enough to darken the sky of the entire São Paulo Metropolitan Region (Escobar, 2019).

The second of the aforementioned factors has to do with the allocation and spatial arrangement of protected areas and the association of these decisions with the preservation of biodiversity, natural capital, and ecosystem services. Achieving these depends on how decision-makers define which areas should be protected so as to ensure all conservation goals are met. This is a topic of interest addressed by Biology since the 1990s, chiefly through landscape ecology studies, a field of study based on the core preliminary concepts of complementarity, flexibility, and irreplaceability (Pressey et al., 1993). As described by Pressey et al. (1993), complementarity exists in a spatial arrangement when an area contributes unrepresented resources to an existing area or set of areas. Flexibility, in turn, refers to the spatial arrangements of complementary areas to meet conservation targets. Finally, Pressey et al. (1993) describe irreplaceability as the assumption that some areas are irreplaceable because they are the only ones capable of meeting the conservation targets set for certain target areas.

These concepts indicate a multidisciplinary versatility in methodologies (Japiassu, 1976), as they require biophysical, spatial, and social variables to be analyzed, but no specific method to follow is determined for said methodologies. In addition, decisions regarding the applicability or exploration of a given methodology have also been affected by (i) advances in computational storage devices; (ii) Remote Sensing; (iii) Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS); and (iv) improvements in the processing, analysis, and modeling of spatial data. Together, these changes have led to the emergence of a new field of methodological analysis, commonly referred to as Systematic Conservation Planning (Woolmer, 2010).

III Systematic conservation planning

The goal of selecting specific areas to be classified as protected is to separate the elements of their biodiversity from processes that threaten their existence in their environment; achieving this purpose is the core aim of the methodological process for conservation called Systematic Conservation Planning (Pressey et al., 2007). Systematic Conservation Planning seeks to identify the spatial arrangement and complementarity of the areas involved, taking into account possible conflicts over land use, in order to delineate protected areas and ecological networks that can meet quantitative goals related to conservation targets and the persistence thereof over time (Margules and Pressey, 2000; Pressey et al., 2007; Smith et al., 2006). Achieving this means that the extraction of natural resources must be either suspended or limited in such regions, but that does not prevent economic activity and political ramifications (such as mining activity or agricultural expansion) from interfering. These processes compete with protected areas, driving degradation, and land use conflict; often to the point that the preservation status itself is converted when protected areas are seen as economically attractive (Margules and Pressey, 2000).

One must be careful when proposing areas for conservation, even if they have been delimited by a Systematic Conservation Planning process, when their actual deployment in the territory can possibly cause conflict over land use. The parameterizations of numerical models do not robustly reproduce the dynamics of socioeconomic phenomena in a given territory as these evolve over time. Systematic Conservation Planning is a conceptual model described in stages for the planning and implementation—as well as the expansion—of protected areas. It was initially developed with six stages, but seven additional stages were added as the model progressed. The method also incorporated three more core concepts over its evolution—efficiency, representativeness, and vulnerability—which we briefly describe below.

The concept of efficiency is intertwined with cost and benefit, representing the importance of selecting the areas that would provide the greatest protection of available environmental resources with the lowest number of conservation units (Margules and Pressey, 2000). Representativeness, in turn, has to do with choosing a set of selected areas that can make up a representative sample of the region’s biodiversity; in other words, it has to do with ensuring that all conservation objects considered relevant should be present and have some form of representation in the system (Margules and Pressey, 2000; Sarkar and Illoldi-Range, 2010). Finally, vulnerability is understood as the probability or imminence of destruction or alteration of conservation resources, as determined via either qualitative or quantitative methods. Vulnerability analysis is performed after priority areas are identified in order to define the urgency of implementation of each selected area (Margules and Pressey, 2000).

When it comes to building numerical models to delimit spatial arrangements, the Systematic Conservation Planning methodology relies on inputs from biogeography, spatial planning and analysis, landscape ecology, and social and economic sciences. Algorithms that comprise these principles can be found in multiple conservation planning software solutions, such as Marxan (Ball and Possingham, 2000), C-Plan (Pressey et al., 2009), and Systematic Conservation Prioritization in R (Hanson et al., 2019).

The results of Systematic Conservation Planning are classified as “natural capital,” a term derived from economics and interpreted here as the stock of materials or information that exist at a given moment in a given environment (Costanza et al., 1997). In this case, maintaining and creating protected areas for the conservation of abiotic and biotic components provides a stock, and the interaction of these components with humans generates a flow of ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005).

IV Ecosystem services

Ecosystem services refer to the multiple benefits acquired by society from nature (Barbier, 2019; Costanza et al., 1997). Analyzing said services is a multidisciplinary effort, with foundations from environmental, social, and economic sciences. This means no specific method to follow exists, but there is complementarity between different fields of study (Japiassu, 1976). The concept of ecosystem services is associated with the concept of natural capital. The difference between the two is that ecosystem services are associated with a temporal dimension. Natural capital, in turn, is a spatial variable that is tied to a specific point in time (Costanza et al., 1997). In other words, the development of a given region is associated with its natural capital (e.g., vegetation, soils, and water resources), and, as such, each type of natural capital provides—either by itself or in combination with others—a succession of ecosystem services through natural properties and processes. Ecosystem services consist of a flow of interactions of materials, energy, and information—that is, ecosystem functions, understood here as the ability of natural processes to provide goods and services to meet human needs (Costanza et al., 1997; De Groot et al., 2002).

Ecosystem functions are like a subset of the ecological processes and structures of the ecosystem. Each function is the result of the natural processes of the total ecological subsystem of which it is a part. These natural processes, in turn, are the result of complex interactions between biotic and abiotic components (De Groot et al., 2002). Overall, as can be seen the theoretical framework for ecosystem services has a number of subjectivities with respect to terminology, categorization, and one’s understanding of the specific interactions between ecosystem functions through which services are generated. These subjectivities occur because the method is not uniform across disciplines (De Groot et al., 2002; Haines-Young and Potschin, 2010).

In the literature, the terms “ecosystem approach” and “ecosystem services” are used interchangeably, but it should be noted that they have different perspectives (Potschin and Haines-Young, 2011; Waylen et al., 2013). The former is a broad and generic approach, an action framework for the integrated management of abiotic and biotic components in marine and terrestrial environments, promoting conservation in a balanced way (Martin-Ortega et al., 2015). The ecosystem approach is based on the application of Malawi’s 12 principles (Garcia et al., 2003), which points to humans as an integral part of ecosystems. The difference between an “ecosystem approach” and an “ecosystem services” is that the former always involves guidelines for how ecosystems should be managed, while ecosystem services may or may not encompass ecosystem management actions (Martin-Ortega et al., 2015).

The categorization of ecosystem services also presents controversies (La Notte et al., 2017). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) firstly delimited four types of ecosystem services: supporting, regulating, provisioning, and cultural services. However, along time, the supporting services were redefined as ecosystem function and the current classifications only considers three types (La Notte et al., 2017). One of the most relevant references for ecosystem services research is the Common International Classification for Ecosystem Services (CICES), proposed by the European Environment Agency. It defines the “provisioning,” “regulating and maintenance,” and “cultural” services are its key components. Provisioning-type ecosystem services encompass products or benefits derived from ecosystems, such as fresh food, forest products, fresh water, fiber, genetic resources, chemicals, and compounds (e.g., latex and gums). In turn, regulating and maintenance services reflect the balance of different ecosystem processes, such as carbon sequestration and storage, flood and erosion control, and maintenance of water quality. Cultural services reflect the intangible benefits obtained through nature, such as recreational, religious, educational, and aesthetic benefits. For illustrative purposes, Figure 1 points out the ecosystem services provided by a continental environment.OPEN IN VIEWER

Analysis of distinctions between different ecosystem functions are used to describe the internal performance of a given ecosystem (e.g., maintenance of energy flows and nutrient recycling), while, at other times, the concept relates to the benefits gained through ecosystem processes and properties (e.g., erosion and sediment retention and control) (De Groot et al., 2002; Haines-Young and Potschin, 2010). However, it is worth pointing out that ecosystem functions do not directly benefit people, as some interpretations of the concept of ecosystem services may suggest, but rather are part of the complex mechanisms and natural processes that generate these benefits.

That said, the creation of conceptual models (e.g., cascade and direct interactions) to describe functions as these relate to drivers ¹ (e.g., land use) are useful as a tool to summarize the logic of ecosystem services, as pointed out by Haines-Young and Potschin (2010). These models help mitigate subjectivities around terminology, categorization, and the description of ecosystem functions—highlighting the point that a common language is required to resolve controversies around ecosystem services in order to help advance proposals for the delimitation, expansion, and implementation of protected areas.

V Ecosystem disservices

The central message of ecosystem services is the importance of conserving sustainable and productive environments so the benefits these services represent for human needs can be leveraged. Such discourse is an attractive rhetoric, often used by advocates to defend the conservation and rational use of aquatic and terrestrial environments and to influence decision makers (Campagne et al., 2018; Shackleton et al., 2016). Ecosystem services are not a novel debate; it has been discussed in scientific studies since the 1960s (Martin-Ortega et al., 2015). That said, as technology advances ² , the field of study had a renaissance of sorts, now being described as a way to solve all issues involved in delimiting, allocating, and managing protected areas (Lyytimäki et al., 2008). That description warrants caution, however, as it suppresses possible negative effects and changes the meaning of core terms used in the theoretical framework for ecosystem services. One must note that ecosystem services cannot fully address the complexities of ecological relationships, as it reduces the process to what is mostly a cost–benefit analysis. One example is the term “trade-off,” often used in ecology to describe the positive and negative interactions between species, which has now become an economics term (Saunders et al., 2016).

In addition, we cannot ignore the negative effects arising from the characteristics of ecosystems, the so-called “ecosystem disservices”—a concept defined as the functions, processes, and attributes generated by ecosystems that result in negative impacts to human needs (Shackleton et al., 2016; Wu et al., 2021). It is a concept without a clear classification, relatively recently, whose harms produced by nature have been acknowledged by individuals and societies throughout generations through the media publicity highlighting the natural hazards in a region (Lyytimäki, 2014).

Looking at ecosystem disservices as a component of ecosystem services can help one gain a better understanding of the environment, enhancing the perception of the positive services (Lyytimäki, 2014). However, it is still unclear how dis-services should be treated in management and accounting frameworks and its analytical usefulness can be contested (Ango et al., 2014; Saunders, 2020). According to Villa et al. (2014) the “ecosystem disservices” concept poses a danger to conservation efforts. Since natural phenomena sometimes harm people or valuable economic assets, the destruction of “harmful” species and ecosystems may appear to be economically justified, often leading to undesirable unintended consequences.

Many studies highlight the dis-services of ecosystems in urban environments (Lyytimäki et al., 2008; Potgieter et al., 2019; Von Döhren and Haase, 2015) by easily identifying the harm of natural phenomena to people or urban structures through floods (Nedkov and Burkhard, 2012), landslides (Yamamoto and Hirano, 2017), earthquakes and volcanoes (Shackleton et al., 2016), or health risks caused by pigeons and rats infestations in urban areas that can result in infectious diseases like leptospirosis and cryptococcosis (Destefano et al., 2005; Lyytimäki and Sipilä, 2009; Tarsitano, 2006). Although these and other studies provide important insights (Villa et al., 2014), we highlight three gaps that need to be addressed—in addition to the subjectivities of ecosystem services—if one seeks to employ the concept more effectively.

The first gap to fill is the inclusion of literature on natural disasters, risk prevention and mitigation, and socio-environmental vulnerability indices. For this to happen, ecosystem services must be extricated from the positive economic message with which it has been intertwined, not least because the literature on the matter, as a rule, does not restrict the analyses performed to monetary value. In fact, assessments based on economic value raise a number of issues, such as the perception and identification of measurable value as it applies to nature; the results are always positive, somehow excluding the possibility of negative values (Chan et al., 2011; Klein et al., 2008; Shackleton et al., 2016).

The second gap is the adoption of the concept of open data. Much science on this area is still being published with limiting restrictions that eliminate the possibility of accessing the underlying data used to stipulate the scores and values attributed to ecosystem services. This calls into question the reliability of many biophysical or economic assessments, especially of those ecosystem services that cannot be easily quantified. This gap, in particular, has contributed to an increasing lack of clarity on whether ecosystem services are an applicable method (Shackleton et al., 2016).

Finally, the third gap is the understanding required of the inextricable space-time relationship. When analyzing the processes of ecosystem functions and identifying the changes in benefits in different environmental contexts, one must be able to detect the transformations of ecosystem services into disservices, and vice versa. However, caution is needed to avoid sending the wrong message about conservation efforts (Shackleton et al., 2016). As an example, the process of reforesting vegetation upstream of a reservoir in a water supply system can be considered an ecosystem disservice at a certain point in time, since the purpose of the reservoir is to capture and accumulate as much water as possible. Reforestation would also decrease the flow of surface runoff that would otherwise be captured by the reservoir when precipitation occurred (Figure 2(a)).OPEN IN VIEWER

However, over time, the water intercepted by the vegetation will supply the water table, ensuring continuous flow of water to the supply system in the dry season. In addition, the volume of sediments that used to arrive at the reservoir with the surface runoff will decrease, allowing for less maintenance needs of the reservoir and less chemicals required to purify the water that will be added to the supply system (Figure 2(b)). Finally, with the presence of vegetation, flow rate as a hydrological response will decrease and evapotranspiration will increase, making it possible to increase the volume of precipitation upstream of the reservoir or in another watershed.

As shown by the above example, the notion of ecosystem services and dis-services is a continuous time-space process, because the benefits acquired by society through ecosystems vary according to social interventions and natural transformations of the elements in the territory.

Ecosystem services and dis-services are one of the reasons for the development of a new concept called “Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs)” which are all the contributions, both positive and negative, of living nature (diversity of organisms, ecosystems, and their associated ecological and evolutionary processes) to people’s quality of life (Díaz et al., 2018). This concept was proposed by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and is based on the ecosystem services concept popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). However, there is still controversy in the literature in which authors still defend the term ecosystem services, which is widely adopted (Montana, 2018; Stothard, 2018).

VI Spatial analysis and geography

Determining the allocation factor for the spatial arrangement of protected areas requires researchers with knowledge of multiple areas of expertise and a deliberate effort to be interdisciplinary in the application of methodological elements. Said deliberate effort is difficult in practice (Cox et al., 2018), however, as there is no common language and method for the different approaches used for the creation, implementation and management of protected areas. In the wake of the controversies environmental approaches for approaches based on Systematic Conservation Planning and ecosystem services, what is often seen are instances of horizontal cooperation without well-defined criteria for the use of concepts from scientific disciplines.

Since researchers' analyses are tied to the knowledge obtained from their training (Santos, 2008), and since there is no uniform language, the results obtained from their work are hampered by the uncertainty of concepts taken from other fields of study, such as Geography’s Spatial Analysis. The contribution of Spatial Analysis (and Geography as a whole) to the discussions on Systematic Conservation Planning and ecosystem services is quite modest if one bases that conclusion on the number of articles in the Web of Science database (Figure 3). Their conceptual contributions, however, are enormous, and seen throughout the discussions of its paradigms and concepts.OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3 allows us to explore some correlations and assumptions. Our attempt so far is not to point out certainties, but rather to show readers that Spatial Analysis has always been used in approaches for the allocation, implementation, and management of protected areas. To this end, we have divided the temporal evolution of approaches based on ecosystem services and Systematic Conservation Planning into two moments.

The first moment is from 1960 to 1990, which saw the consolidation of concepts for which the technology of the time allowed only limited application, such as energy quantification and continuous environmental monitoring. It is also when concepts begin to be explored from an economic sciences perspective; the term “trade-off” gains the connotative sense of monetary cost and benefit, no longer only ecological in nature.

The second moment, from 1991 to present day, is marked by the technological apogee that enabled various new ways of exploring environmental analysis. The increase in scientific publications (Figure 3) may also be associated with increased buy-in, as well as the constant scientific exploration for the application of environmental projects based on Payment for Environmental Services (PES), a strategy first piloted in 1997 in Costa Rica (Martin-Ortega et al., 2015). Moreover, one could also argue the large volume of publications in this second moment is associated with the complexities of promoting environmental conservation in the face of economic exploitation and, also, increased buy-in of PES processes by public institutions via legal instruments.

In order to better understand how Systematic Conservation Planning was applied in these two moments, as already stated, one must look at it from a temporal perspective, while ecosystem services require analysis from a spatial perspective (Martín-López et al., 2009). In both cases, application and exploration of these concepts takes place via avenues such as spatial arrangement, space-time processes, and spatial prediction/modeling (Ferreira, 2014). These themes are also associated with three paradigms, namely: (1) classificatory practices, (2) the representation of spatial objects and phenomena, and (3) spatial dependence and heterogeneity (Chorley and Haggett, 1975; Christofoletti, 1999; Ferreira, 2014).

Spatial analysis is the analysis, temporal observation, and spatial prediction of a certain configuration of land and marine objects, as represented either by lines, points, and polygons or a surface of continuous values. This disciplinary module is closely associated with geography, and provides researchers with a synthesis, in a precise, ordered and reactive manner, of how the interconnectedness and multiplicity of phenomena on the Earth’s surface translates into arrangements and distributions of specific areas (Berry, 1964; Hartshorne, 1978).

The widespread use of Spatial Analysis and its complexity in the synthesis of geographic phenomena such as location, diffusion, dispersion, spatial hierarchization, segregation, and centrality of objects (Cox, 1995) stem from the emergence of the concepts of site and situation presented by Berry (1964), who was dis-satisfied with the set of practices in the methods used by geographers to classify their problems (Chorley and Haggett, 1975). The former corresponds to a series of places or regions, while the latter described the characteristics or attributes that occur in all places. In other words, these concepts are presented as the “Geographic Matrix.” The matrix also includes a third axis: time, represented through a matrix overlay in which each matrix represents a site and its various situations over time (Berry, 1964; Ferreira, 2013, 2014).

Although the use of the geographic matrix for classification has led to progress in conventional geographic studies, there are limitations with regard to its accuracy when the amount of information that needs to be stored in the matrix increases. The difficulty of analyzing the columns also increases when new areas are added to the matrix, which brings the possibility of gaps emerging and a reduced of scope of possible explanations for overlaps of other elements ³ in the same column (Chorley and Haggett, 1975).

These limitations were partially overcome when computers became an important part of geographic studies. However, another paradigm then became evident: that of the representation of spatial objects and phenomena. Before commenting on this paradigm, it should be noted that the limitations of classificatory practices are overcome at the same pace as the computational potential for the storage, retrieval, analysis, and graphical display of data increases. Therefore, digital environments have made it possible to reduce the size and complexity of the geographic matrix, but the transformation of real geographic space into digital space was only made possible through two models combined: graphic and digital. The former entails the encoding of geographic information into graphic symbols. The latter, in turn, transforms the graphical model into a numerical model compatible with computational systems (Ferreira, 2014).

The representation of geographic information in the digital model exposes the representation paradigm of objects, which are laid out either as continuous fields or exact objects. Continuous fields are a representation of geographic information through a continuous surface that reflects the spatial distribution of an element. Exact objects, in turn, make it possible to represent a geographical element through geometric objects such as points, lines, and polygons (Chorley and Haggett, 1975; Ferreira, 2014). The paradigm presented, then, asks of users to understand the notion of scale as well as the relativity of location (Chorley and Haggett, 1975), since, as geographic scale changes, an exact object also changes its form of representation. Location is another issue. It can be considered absolute or relative, because an object may correspond to an absolute position in relation to a reference system with its coordinate pair but also de deemed to have a relative location when that is defined in terms of the location of another object.

The paradigms presented so far and explored in geography have contributed enormously to ecological studies, as they enabled the manipulation and representation of geographic phenomena and objects over time in order to identify solutions to conservation. Consequently, those from other areas of knowledge who are interested in carrying out projects in the field of conservation should be aware of the principles of Spatial Analysis, at the peril of otherwise turning their projects into black-boxes when it comes to the treatment of the geographic data used to simulate and optimize landscapes.

Finally, the third paradigm of Spatial Analysis is spatial dependence and heterogeneity. This particular paradigm encompasses a number of statistical methods for analysis, such as spatial autocorrelation and interpolation (Christofoletti, 1999; Ferreira, 2014). Spatial dependence means that, the smaller the spatial sample size, the more likely the object under analysis is to be the same or similar to its neighbor. On the other hand, spatial heterogeneity is the inverse of spatial dependence, representing the occurrence of spatial variation (Christofoletti, 1999; Ferreira, 2014). Being aware of this paradigm is fundamental for the use spatial data and for the interpretation of the results of cluster analyses, multivariate techniques or landscape simulation processes, as well for the screening of inconsistencies in results.

Spatial Analysis, as can be seen, has become a core tenet of discussions on how to allocate and manage protected areas, specifically as those debates revolve around ecosystem services and Systematic Conservation Planning. Spatial analysis techniques are used by professionals in the environmental area to simulate and represent phenomena and geographic objects to be protected, such as hydrological processes and fauna and flora species. However, the lack of robust scientific production in the field of geography on the themes of ecosystem services and Systematic Conservation Planning may not stem only from matters of perspective, as pointed out by Potschin and Haines-Young (2011), but rather from the absence of a common language.

This inhibits the proper understanding of discussions around approaches for the allocation and management of protected areas that represent a space-time process, such as that of ecosystem disservices. Geography as a field of study, despite its low level of scientific production on the approaches described above, has made enormous contributions to environmental studies. Its focus, however, is not reduced to a matter of monetary cost and benefit, even because the elements of analysis are the abstract qualities of the objects that are studied by geography and not the objects themselves—factors such as the existence of spatial relationships between types of vegetation and water, for example, (Chorley and Haggett, 1975). The different branches of study of geography should be further explored in the analysis of such matters; it is clear they have a lot to contribute, especially in discussions about landscapes, by strengthening the understanding, for example, of cultural services.

So far, we have observed that the available studies do not explicitly address the geography paradigms; however, we can identify how spatial analysis is evidenced through the spatial heterogeneity used by Kozak et al. (2011) to identify human settlement patterns in determining ecosystem service value in two Illinois wetland ecosystems in metropolitan Chicago, or in the spatial prediction used in the Systematic Conservation Planning Process to delimit efficient protected areas in Africa (Margules and Sarkar, 2007). Then there is the spatial dependence paradigm, used by Brown et al. (2012), to identify ecosystem services through the public participation geographic information system in Grand County, Colorado.

VII Final Considerations

Our aim with this paper was to present to our readers the contributions of geography, through Spatial Analysis, to two scientific-methodological approaches used in environmental conservation: Systematic Conservation Planning and ecosystem services. We argue that Systematic Conservation Planning must be understood from a temporal perspective and ecosystem services must be understood from a spatial perspective: in other words, that, together, they provide a space-time process for the allocation, delimitation, and management of protected areas that fulfill the goal of providing direct and indirect benefits that meet conservation targets for sustainable development (Li and Heap, 2014; West, 2015). In addition, advances in each approach are intertwined with advances in methods for quantifying biophysical variables at the Earth’s surface, including on geospatial data processing/storage capabilities, as well as advances in techniques for geospatial analysis of abiotic and biotic components.

It is clear that environmental conservation approaches have limitations, especially when it comes to ecosystem services. These were first addressed by the economic sciences and later explored by several areas of knowledge, causing conceptual confusion as different researchers' analyses focused on the concepts of their own background training (Santos, 2008), and, because no specific method to be followed exists, controversies around the accuracy of the concept of ecosystem services have only increased over time. Furthermore, emphasizing ecosystem disservices is relevant, as it shows that there is much to be done to consolidate the core goal of ecosystem services—considering the two are inextricable and represented by continuous time-space transformations in the territory. It is on these transformations that Geography shows its potential in ecological approaches by contributing to the identifying of abstract phenomena to the point of understanding the possibilities and limitations of landscape processes to the human requirements that may translate as ecosystem services and disservices.

Finally, while geography, in addition to its spatial-temporal analysis, also currently contributes—through spatial analysis—to the methodological processes used to quantify and map natural capital and ecosystem services, this contribution can go further by including processes to delimit natural capital and ecosystem services. Scientific work in geography has been heavily focused on determining the abstract features of observed objects or phenomena. It is important, however, that its contributions also focus on the processes used to delimit ecosystem services.