Conserving Biodiversity Efficiently: What to Do, Where, and When

Abstract

Conservation priority-setting schemes have not yet combined geographic priorities with a framework that can guide the allocation of funds among alternate conservation actions that address specific threats. We develop such a framework, and apply it to 17 of the world's 39 Mediterranean ecoregions. This framework offers an improvement over approaches that only focus on land purchase or species richness and do not account for threats. We discover that one could protect many more plant and vertebrate species by investing in a sequence of conservation actions targeted towards specific threats, such as invasive species control, land acquisition, and off-reserve management, than by relying solely on acquiring land for protected areas. Applying this new framework will ensure investment in actions that provide the most cost-effective outcomes for biodiversity conservation. This will help to minimise the misallocation of scarce conservation resources.

Between-country collaboration and consideration of costs increase conservation planning efficiency in the Mediterranean Basin

“…Regional coordination can be especially important in places where a single biome is split between several geopolitical units that vary not only in their levels of biodiversity, but also in their conservation threats and the cost of conservation action. Hence, there is a need for efficient planning efforts that properly integrate at least 3 factors: biodiversity, its threats, and the cost of conservation actions (6,(11)(12)(13). Four of the 5 Mediterranean global biodiversity hotspots (14) consist of only 1 or 2 countries each (South Africa, Chile, United States-Mexico, and Australia).…”

“…Increasingly, researchers have recognized that an objective that minimizes a combination of real economic costs, and also less quantifiable social costs, is more appropriate than minimizing area or simple acquisition costs (5,13,19). We developed a metric for the relative cost of an area that is a combination of the cost of conservation action in different countries and human population density.…”

Taxonomic and regional uncertainty in species-area relationships and the identification of richness hotspots

“…Whether such variation was systematic, it could have significant implications particularly for the fundamental understanding of the distribution of biodiversity that underlies much of the prioritization of lands for conservation investment and action (33). For example, studies have variously sought to incorporate the effects of variation in area on species richness at large spatial scales (often ecoregions) when considering the concordance of spatial variation in richness of different higher taxa (13,34), patterns of protected area coverage (35), the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity (36), and the allocation of conservation resources (37,38).…”

A Scenario-Based Method for Assessing the Impact of Suggested Woodland Key Habitats on Forest Harvesting Costs

“…The early development of these methods included analysis to identify the set of reserves that maximized the total number of species included (e.g., [3][4][5]). Today, in addition to a range of methodological developments, these approaches typically integrate economic and socio-political analysis into the planning process to meet the real-world prioritization challenges (e.g., [6,7]). …”