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NATIONAL REPORT CARDS
This chapter has explored how the Half-Earth Project integrates local scale knowledge into a global portrait of the biosphere and uses this information to coordinate a global conservation strategy. To facilitate local conservation action, however, these results must be interpretable and meaningful at the scale in which policy and decision-making is implemented, which means translating them back into local scale knowledge. The National Report Cards in the Half-Earth Project Map summarize various aspects of conservation efforts at the national level. They can be used to explore various national indicators measuring conservation needs and progress and to understand different challenges faced by each country. Once a country is selected on the map for exploration, the rest of the world map falls away and exposes an interactive 3D map.
In addition to details about national SPI values and priority areas for conservation, the report cards feature information about each country’s species composition, including downloadable tables of indigenous species and various species-specific metrics such as stewardship and a Species Protection Score (SPS). The species stewardship element of the National Report Card scales up the concept of joint responsibility for a species by considering all of the land vertebrates in each country. Through this approach, it’s possible to see the number of countries that share the stewardship of a species. The SPS goes deeper into that concept by providing an assessment of the protection accomplished per species, per country.
The SPS differs from the SPI in that it reflects the level of protection an individual species receives within a given country. An SPS value indicates how close a country is to meeting a species’ conservation target relative to the amount of species habitat
it has stewardship over. A single species will therefore have a unique SPS for each country that overlaps with its global range. SPS values are presented as ranges ( for example, 75–100) to reflect some of the spatial uncertainty associated with species distributions.
The Challenges panel of the National Report Cards explores the relationships between the SPI and the various sociopolitical and biodiversity indicators of different nations. Scatter plots can be filtered to emphasize similarities between countries and the social challenges they face in ensuring equitable global biodiversity conservation. By grouping countries by their similarities, this feature of the National Report Cards could make it easier for countries to learn from one another and replicate each other’s successes. Countries can be filtered by stewardship to reveal the 10 countries with the greatest number of species in common. This capability provides insight into which countries could work together to give to the largest number of species the best level of protection possible. Because individual species are often found in many countries, the entire global population of each species needs protection wherever they are found.
The Ranking panel of the National Report Cards provides a concise overview of each country’s species composition, human modification, protection status, and SPI ranking, further facilitating comparisons between countries.
As the National Report Cards continue to be updated regularly, the Half-Earth Project plans to expand the concept to summarize regional areas such as states and provinces.
National Report Card for Uganda.
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