Describe a Natural Protected Area Where You Live

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I’m working on a Environmental Science exercise and need support.

Describe a natural protected area where you live (city or state). Use Phoenix/Arizona

Where is this park and what makes people want to visit it?
Have you been there or do you plan to in the future?
What are some efforts made to protect the area (natural features, animals, plants, etc.)?
What are some concerns to protecting the area?

Protected areas or conservation areas are locations which receive protection because of their recognized natural, ecological or cultural values. There are several kinds of protected areas, which vary by level of protection depending on the enabling laws of each country or the regulations of the international organizations involved. Generally speaking though, protected areas are understood to be those in which human presence or at least the exploitation of natural resources (e.g. firewood, non-timber forest products, water, …) is limited.[1]

The term “protected area” also includes marine protected areas, the boundaries of which will include some area of ocean, and transboundary protected areas that overlap multiple countries which remove the borders inside the area for conservation and economic purposes. There are over 161,000 protected areas in the world (as of October 2010)[2] with more added daily, representing between 10 and 15 percent of the world’s land surface area.[3][4][5]

As of 2016, there are 14,688 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), and approximately 14.7% of the world’s terrestrial and inland water areas (excluding Antarctica) are protected.[6] For waters under national jurisdiction beyond inland waters, approximately 10.2% of coastal and marine areas and 4.12% of global ocean areas are covered by marine protected areas.[6] In contrast, only 0.25% of the world’s oceans beyond national jurisdiction are covered by MPAs.[6] In recent years, the 30 by 30 initiative has targeted to protect 30% of ocean territory and 30% of land territory worldwide by 2030; this has been adopted by the European Union in its Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, Campaign for Nature which promoted the goal during the Convention on Biodiversity’s COP15 Summit[7] and the G7.[8]

Protected areas are implemented for biodiversity conservation, often providing habitat and protection from hunting for threatened and endangered species. Protection helps maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes.[9]

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Protection of natural resources
The objective of protected areas is to conserve biodiversity and to provide a way for measuring the progress of such conservation. Protected areas will usually encompass several other zones that have been deemed important for particular conservation uses, such as Important Bird Areas (IBA) and Endemic Bird Areas (EBA), Centres of Plant Diversity (CPD), Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCA), Alliance for Zero Extinction Sites (AZE) and Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) among others. Likewise, a protected area or an entire network of protected areas may lie within a larger geographic zone that is recognised as a terrestrial or marine ecoregions (see Global 200), or a Crisis Ecoregions for example.[13] As a result, Protected Areas can encompass a broad range of governance types. A wide variety of rights-holders and stakeholders are involved in the governance and management of protected areas, including forest protected areas, such as government agencies and ministries at various levels, elected and traditional authorities, indigenous peoples and local communities, private individuals and non-profit trusts, among others.[12] Most protected-area and forest management institutions acknowledge the importance of recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, sharing the costs and benefits of protected areas and actively involving them in their governance and management.[12] This has led to the recognition of four main types of governance, defined on the basis of who holds authority, responsibility, and who can be held accountable for the key decisions for protected areas.[12] Indeed, governance of protected areas has emerged a critical factor in their success.

Subsequently, the range of natural resources that any one protected area may guard is vast. Many will be allocated primarily for species conservation whether it be flora or fauna or the relationship between them, but protected areas are similarly important for conserving sites of (indigenous) cultural importance and considerable reserves of natural resources such as;

Carbon stocks: Carbon emissions from deforestation account for an estimated 20% of global carbon emissions, so in protecting the worlds carbon stocks greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and longterm land cover change is prevented, which is an effective strategy in the struggle against global warming. Of all global terrestrial carbon stock, 15.2% is contained within protected areas. Protected areas in South America hold 27% of the world’s carbon stock, which is the highest percentage of any country in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the total stock.[14]
Rainforests: 18.8% of the world’s forest is covered by protected areas and sixteen of the twenty forest types have 10% or more protected area coverage. Of the 670 ecoregions with forest cover, 54% have 10% or more of their forest cover protected under IUCN Categories I – VI.[15]
Mountains: Nationally designated protected areas cover 14.3% of the world’s mountain areas, and these mountainous protected areas made up 32.5% of the world’s total terrestrial protected area coverage in 2009. Mountain protected area coverage has increased globally by 21% since 1990 and out of the 198 countries with mountain areas, 43.9% still have less than 10% of their mountain areas protected.[16]
Annual updates on each of these analyses are made in order to make comparisons to the Millennium Development Goals and several other fields of analysis are expected to be introduced in the monitoring of protected areas management effectiveness, such as freshwater and marine or coastal studies which are currently underway, and islands and drylands which are currently in planning.