Effectiveness of Tradable Permits for the Conservation of Metacommunities With Two Competing Species

Market-based instruments are gaining relevance for biodiversity conservation, since they promise higher cost-effectiveness than other instruments like planning. Previous studies have analysed the effectiveness of market-based instruments on single or multiple but independent species. On the example of tradable land-use permits we address an important issue for the first time: the conservation of interacting species (metacommunities). We consider two competing species where the superior competitor locally replaces the inferior competitor. Both species are structured as metapopulations, i.e. can go locally extinct while empty habitats can be recolonised by local populations on neighbouring habitats. Combining a spatially explicit and dynamic ecological-economic simulation model with cluster analysis we investigate how the coexistence of both species depends on the design of the tradable permit scheme, and how the effective scheme design (i.e. the scheme design that maximises coexistence) depends on the biological characteristics of the two species. We show that scheme designs that are effective for the conservation of single species may be ineffective for the conservation of two competing species and that the effectiveness of a scheme with regard to coexistence strongly depends on the relative performances of the two species with regard to their colonisation abilities and local extinction risks.