Impediments to the Success of Management Actions for Species Recovery

Abstract

Finding cost-effective management strategies to recover species declining due to multiple threats is challenging, especially when there are limited resources. Recent studies offer insights into how costs and threats can influence the best choice of management actions. However, when implementing management actions in the real-world, a range of impediments to management success often exist that can be driven by social, technological and land-use factors. These impediments may limit the extent to which we can achieve recovery objectives and influence the optimal choice of management actions. Nonetheless, the implications of these impediments are not well understood, especially for recovery planning involving multiple actions. We used decision theory to assess the impact of these types of impediments for allocating resources among recovery actions to mitigate multiple threats. We applied this to a declining koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) population threatened by habitat loss, vehicle collisions, dog attacks and disease. We found that the unwillingness of dog owners to restrain their dogs at night (a social impediment), the effectiveness of wildlife crossings to reduce vehicle collisions (a technological impediment) and the unavailability of areas for restoration (a land-use impediment) significantly reduced the effectiveness of our actions. In the presence of these impediments, achieving successful recovery may be unlikely. Further, these impediments influenced the optimal choice of recovery actions, but the extent to which this was true depended on the target koala population growth rate. Given that species recovery is an important strategy for preserving biodiversity, it is critical that we consider how impediments to the success of recovery actions modify our choice of actions. In some cases, it may also be worth considering whether investing in reducing or removing impediments may be a cost-effective course of action.

Effects of threat management interactions on conservation priorities

“…; Halpern & Fujita ; Ng et al. ). As such, the biological and economic complexity of many conservation problems has been neglected (Polasky et al.…”

“…Threats and consequently the effects of actions to mitigate them are usually assumed to be independent and additive, or the focus of management is on abating a dominant threat (e.g., Didham et al 2007;Halpern & Fujita 2013;Ng et al 2014). As such, the biological and economic complexity of many conservation problems has been neglected Brook et al 2008).…”

Spatially explicit cost-effective actions for biodiversity threat abatement

“…Conservation planning that has its foundation in decision theory is transparent and repeatable, in contrast to even well-intentioned and considered conservation decisions that are made in a less systematic or structured way , Wilson et al 2009a. Decision theory supports making choices in a wide range of management dilemmas such as selecting a habitat-protection strategy that minimises risk of population extinction (Haight et al 2002), determining when to stop managing threatened species (Chadès et al 2008), choosing which isolated threatened species populations to manage , and modifying management depending upon impediments to recovery action success (Ng et al 2014). Decision makers can make more logical and accountable conservation investment decisions, when actions for addressing biodiversity decline are evaluated within a decision-theory framework.…”

“…Assuming independent costs and benefits simplifies a CEA (e.g. Auerbach et al 2014, Ng et al 2014. However, overlooking the dependencies between and within costs and benefits of actions neglects the biological and economic complexity of many conservation problems .…”

Accounting for the links between social and ecological systems for effective nature conservation

“…This has implications for conservation scientists and practitioners beyond the obvious but vague instruction to 'embrace' the social sciences (Mascia et al, 2003;Reyers et al, 2010), or incorporation of social factors into limited aspects of conservation planning and prioritisation (e.g. Adams et al, 2014;Guerrero et al, 2010;Ng et al, 2014;Whitehead et al, 2014). I believe that in order to improve the science and practice of conservation it is critical to understand the role that the various social processes play in the successful planning and implementation of actions, and how these facilitate or hinder conservation outcomes.…”