Local communities contribute to broader biodiversity protection goals when managing their immediate environment when they establish protected areas. However, their efforts are geographically constrained and often uncoordinated. We compare protected areas established by local communities through the direct democracy process in California, US, to protected areas created and managed by two conservation actors working over larger spatial scales, one private and one public. Despite being geographically constrained to smaller spatial scales, protected areas established by local communities were as effective as those established by larger scale conservation actors at representing different habitat types. However, local ballot protected areas tended to protect more common species. All three protected area networks often performed no better than random in terms of siting protected areas to support narrow range species and rare habitats. Improved accounting of local communities’ protection efforts would allow organizations with greater funding flexibility to focus their efforts to increase representation of rarer species and habitats in protected area systems.

中文翻译：

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当地社区通过直接民主建立的保护区与大空间规划保护区一样有效地涵盖了物种栖息地

当地社区在建立保护区时管理其直接环境，为更广泛的生物多样性保护目标做出贡献。然而，他们的努力受到地域限制，而且往往不协调。我们将当地社区通过美国加利福尼亚州的直接民主程序建立的保护区与由两个在更大空间范围内工作的保护参与者（一个私人和一个公共）创建和管理的保护区进行了比较。尽管在地理上受限于较小的空间尺度，但当地社区建立的保护区在代表不同栖息地类型方面与更大规模的保护行动者建立的保护区一样有效。然而，当地的投票保护区倾向于保护更常见的物种。在选址保护区以支持狭窄范围的物种和稀有栖息地方面，所有三个保护区网络的表现通常并不比随机好。改进对当地社区保护工作的核算将使具有更大资金灵活性的组织能够集中精力提高稀有物种和栖息地在保护区系统中的代表性。