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There are many major issues or obstacles to face then attempting conservation efforts outside a protected area (PA). Such obstacles include (but aren’t limited to):

 Deforestation

 

• Deforestation is the removal of forest for anthropogenic uses such as industrial or residential development.
• The loss of forests all over the world is having a dramatic impact on ecological processes as well as global climatic and biogeochemical cycles, such as the carbon and oxygen cycle.
• Deforestation not only gets rid of the trees in an area, it also causes all the species associated with the forest to disappear by reducing the available habitat for them. This loss of habitat affects birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, arthropods, lichens, plants, and the list goes on.
• A Canadian example of how deforestation affects more than just the trees is the Woodland Caribou, particularly in Alberta [5]. The Woodland Caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Alberta is under threat due to loss of intact habitat as they avoid recently deforested or clear cut areas and need large ranges to avoid predators.
• The loss of forests is not only a boreal biome problem, many areas of the world are going through the same thing, such as Asia [1].

 

 Industrial and residential development

• Encroachment on the “wild” landscape and destruction of habitat

• The deforestation and conversion of certain land areas for agricultural or other anthropogenic uses is also a major obstacle in conservation outside protected areas.

• There are many examples of this, such as the conversion of prairie grassland to agricultural land or the conversion of forest in to plantations and farms.

• This disturbance is not limited to conversion to agricultural land, however. Oil and gas exploration as well as mining for minerals and metals have a huge impact on the environment and all the animals within it. Tailings ponds from mining are completely devoid of life and any life (particularly waterfowl) that attempts to use them often ends swiftly.

• Agricultural runoff can also cause aquatic problems such as eutrophication (or excess nutrients) which allow one (or a few) species to dominate the water and can effectively kill off all the fish and other life by creating “dead zones” where there is no oxygen left in the water.
• The establishment of pipelines can also cause many problems in the "wild" landscape [3].

 Hunting and fishing

• Animal hunting/fishing for sport is having a large effect on population sizes and genetic structures of some populations of animals.

• The hunting of trophy game and fish can cause a shift in genetic diversity that natural selection would not normally cause. For example, hunting deer with large antlers for trophies may cause a shift in selection pressures in which the deer with smaller antlers are now favoured, especially if the deer with large antlers were unable to reproduce before they were removed for the population. This selection gradient is in the opposite direction of natural and sexual selection (particularly the latter) because females chose males based on their defensive skills over their harem (bigger antlers usually means bigger males, so they are more likely to win a conflict).

• This is applicable to conservation because if the males get smaller than the females are less likely to choose them and they may also be able to produce less offspring which decreases the population size.

• The same scenario can be said for fish but it is much worse, since females can get larger than males and the size of the female is often related to the number of eggs they produce (so fishing out the big females means there are less fish produced each breeding season).

 Hydroelectric dams

• The building of hydro-electric dams to provide electricity is another problem that is faced when attempting conservation outside a protected area.

• A dam effectively stops the natural flow of water and may even change its course. The dam will also cause some fish to become stranded on one side of the dam or the other and if a series of dams run along a river fish can become trapped between these dams, which can ultimately lead to genetic problems from the build-up of bad genes.

• Changing the water flow not only affects the fish and other aquatic organisms, it can also affect terrestrial ones. For example, if a river becomes dammed and turns into a lake then a predator (a bear for example) would be less likely to catch food because of the deeper water. The opposite may be true as well; a dam may make it easier for a predator to catch its prey because they will have nowhere to go, which could have disastrous effects for a population.