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  • Executive summary
  • Front Material
    • Contents
    • Index of figures
    • Index of tables
    • Acronyms and abbreviations
    • Terms and definitions
  • Getting started
  • Introduction
    • The urgency of targeted biodiversity conservation
    • Simplicity, complexity theory, and biodiversity
    • Inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities by design
    • Biodiversity methodology benefits
  • Overall description
    • Objectives
    • Scope
    • Limitations
  • Project description
    • Principles
      • Principles of working with IP
    • Eligibility criteria
      • Land ownership and law
    • Additionality
    • Project boundaries
      • Spatial limits of the BCP
      • Temporal limits of the BCP
      • Grouped projects
    • Implementation plan
      • Measurement approaches
      • Indicator species observations
      • Risks and uncertainty
    • Effective participation
      • Community involvement
      • Capacity for action
      • Financial transparency
      • Safeguards checklist
  • Calculation
    • Unit calculations
    • Area calculations
    • Time calculations
    • Integrity calculations
    • Value calculations
  • Baseline assessment
    • Baseline ecosystem categorization
    • Analysis of agents and drivers of biodiversity loss
    • Baseline biodiversity (optional)
    • Baseline risk of biodiversity loss
    • Indicator species selection
    • Indicator species integrity score
  • SDG contributions
  • Monitoring plan
    • Monitoring report
    • Additional monitoring requirements
  • Authors
  • References
  • Appendices
    • Appendix A: Biodiversity methodologies comparison table
    • Appendix B: Sample legal proof of land control
    • Appendix C: Sample baseline ecosystem categorization
    • Appendix D: Species categorization of richness
    • Appendix E: Sample selection of indicator species
    • Appendix F: Sample indicator-species observations
    • Appendix G: Sample open-source code and calculation
    • Appendix H: Indigenous authors
    • Appendix I: Letters of support
      • Fernando Ayerbe, Ornithology
      • Ned Hording, Biodiversity
      • Olber Llanos, Zoologist
      • Mike McColm, Ethnology
      • Peter Thomas, Anthropologist
      • Jesús Argente, Marine biology
      • Sara Andreotti, Marine Biologist
      • Carolina Romero, Lawyer.
      • Daniel Urbano, Herpetologist
      • Ramesh Boonratana PhD, Primatologist
      • Theodore Schmitt, Conservationists
      • Anja Hutschenreiter, Ecologist and Tropical Conservationist
      • Miguel Chindoy, Indigenous leader
    • Appendix J: Sample uses of biodiversity unit
    • Appendix K: How to do FPIC
    • Appendix L: Independent Expert Panel Checklist
    • Appendix M: How to calculate a biodiversity credit by hand
    • Appendix N: How to calculate home ranges
    • Appendix O: How to calculate integrity scores
  • Document history
  • Disclaimer
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  1. Calculation

Time calculations

Calculating biodiversity credits over time to avoid double-crediting

PreviousArea calculationsNextIntegrity calculations

Last updated 1 year ago

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An observation from an indicator species has a base duration of 60 days. These days are defined as 30 days prior, and 30 days post the documented observation date-time stamp. The unit by contrast has a base duration of one month, or 30 days. So one observation issues at most two credits, one before and one afterward.

This time period was chosen carefully based on the periodicity of subsistence lifestyles for IP and LC experts, the cost of monitoring devices for IP and LC, the incompletely characterized effects of electromagnetic fields from tracking devices on the full gamut of species within protected zones, and the potential for hunting or poaching to reduce animal populations during the monitoring period ().

The system does not allow double-crediting, for observations overlapping in time. Observations occur fluidly throughout the monitoring period. Monitoring groups exhibit hunter-gatherer periodicity in work activities. Furthermore, animals have diurnal and seasonal variation in observed behaviors. The methodology accounts for this, summing observations to standardize crediting in both space (), and time ().

  1. The circle(s) representing the credited hectares for the observation points are first assigned a date-range, which may overlap in area with another observation point during the same time period,

  2. If observations overlap in time, the area of the observations are unioned for each date,

  3. The resulting map is then clipped by the project boundaries to calculate the area to be credited,

  4. The time period and map are then summed to present the total number of hectares that are available for crediting within that year.

Figure 9. Union of observations which overlap in time and space to calculate crediting

Just as we credit only once for one hectare, even if more than one species is sighted, we credit only once per day for the hectare, even if there were multiple sightings that occurred with overlapping time periods. For example, if a sighting happened one day after a previous sighting in the same area, only one more day would be accounted for, not 30 days prior or after, because the delta is only that one extra day. This function in mathematics is known as the union of overlapping sets.

Figure 10. Biodiversity credits appearing and disappearing over time with different species' observations

Appendix H
Figure 7b
Figure 7
Page cover image