DOI: 10.5061/dryad.474hv77
title: Data from: The contribution of land tenure diversity to the spatial resilience of protected area networks

description: 1. The relationship between diversity and resilience is relatively
 well-established for ecological systems, but remains much less explored
 for socioeconomic systems. Institutional diversity may have particular
 relevance for protected areas, whose managerial responses to environmental
 change depend on their legal basis, ability to make and enforce rules, and
 socio-political acceptance and endorsement. 2. Protected area expansion
 strategies are increasingly turning to private land conservation to
 increase the configuration and connectivity of national protected area
 networks. Yet we know little about the relative role of privately-owned
 protected areas in protecting threatened and poorly protected
 (under-represented) habitats, and in the overall connectivity of the
 national protected area network. 3. We present an empirical assessment of
 protected area tenure diversity across South Africa. 4. Privately-owned
 protected areas comprise 25.58% (2878422.26 ha) of the area of the total
 protected area estate. 5. Private nature reserves emerged as the dominant
 protected area type in under-represented and threatened habitats,
 protecting, on average, 32%, 38%, and 41%, respectively, of poorly
 protected, threatened and endangered vegetation classes. 6. Private nature
 reserves had the largest overall effect, compared to other protected area
 types, on connectivity within the national network. A spatially randomised
 comparison showed that privately-owned protected areas are over-dispersed
 and more strategically positioned to connect other types of protected
 areas than would be expected by chance from their extent and abundance. 7.
 Our results suggest that privately-owned protected areas enhance the
 resilience of the national protected area network, making it more
 extensive and better-connected, with greater levels of habitat redundancy.
 More generally, our analysis highlights the potentially valuable role of
 institutional diversity in building resilient habitat networks for
 biodiversity conservation.
description: South African Formally
 Proclaimed Protected Areas (Reserves)Formal protected areas
 (PAs) in South Africa (ones that are counted towards the total
 conservation estate) are defined according to the National Environmental
 Management: Protected Areas Act (2003), and include national parks,
 special nature reserves, nature reserves and protected environments
 (Department of Environmental Affairs 2015). World heritage sites and
 mountain catchment areas are also included in this act, though they are
 declared and governed by their own legislation (Department of
 Environmental Affairs 2015). World heritage sites were omitted from this
 dataset because their core areas overlap with other PAs. Protected
 environments can also overlap with other PA types and were thus excluded.
 All types of PAs can exist on private land (Cumming & Daniels 2014).
 Our final PA boundary dataset comprised GIS data, consolidated using
 ArcGIS 10.5 (ESRI 2017) from the national PA register (South African PA
 Dataset; PACA), provincial conservation authorities, and national gazettes
 (see Table S1.2, described in DEA 2013). PAs not included in PACA, but
 designated in other datasets were systematically added to the master PA
 data layer, after checking the online gazettes (accessed through
 https://www.sabinet.co.za) for any relevant PA degrading, downsizing or
 degazettement (PADDDing, Mascia & Pailler 2011; Mascia et al. 2014). A
 big data gap existed, however, due to older private nature reserves that
 were not well established in the national PA register. Since these areas
 do officially form part of the country’s conservation estate (Cumming
 & Daniels 2014), we mapped them by matching the farm names, numbers
 and portions designated in both current and retrospective provincial
 gazettes with those in a farm-portion-level cadastral dataset, obtained
 from AfriGIS (2012). Identified polygons were extracted from the cadastral
 dataset, and attribute data were edited to reflect the declaration date
 (and degazettement date, where appropriate), its gazette number, and
 ownership details. All datasets were projected to Albers Equal Area and
 consolidated using this projection. More details, references and metadata
 descriptions can be found in the “README” file.FormalPAs_reserves.zip