Prioritizing threat management for biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Calls for threat management actions to protect biodiversity and restore ecosystem function are rarely coupled with costed and prioritized sets of management actions for use in decision making. We present a cost-effectiveness approach for prioritizing threat management to maximize the in situ protection of biodiversity per dollar spent. The approach draws on empirical data and expert knowledge of major threats to biodiversity, feasible threat management actions, and likely responses of biodiversity to a set of costed management scenarios. An application assessing 637 vertebrate wildlife species in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia suggests that the likely functional loss of 45 mammals, birds, and reptiles over the next 20 years can be averted by effectively managing fire, grazing, and invasive species for approximately AU$40 million per year. Our approach is flexible and may be useful for delivering transparent guidance for conserving species and ecosystems in other regions, including those where data is limited.

Sympatric prey responses to lethal top-predator control: predator manipulation experiments

“…Despite the potential for substantial and direct negative effects of dingoes on the same threatened fauna through predation [26,51,55,70], such predictions have led some to advocate cessation of dingo control programs with the expectation that doing so will provide widespread net benefits to threatened fauna at lower trophic levels (e.g. [13,32,71]). However, our simultaneous assessment of the effects of dingo control on predator and prey populations demonstrated that the predicted mesopredator increases do not occur (Table 5 and because contemporary dingo control practices "do not appear to suppress dingo populations to levels low enough and long enough for mesopredators to exploit the situation" ( [25], pg.…”

Can we save large carnivores without losing large carnivore science?

“…trapping, hunting, or poisoning) must be banned in order to generate cascading, positive effects on biodiversity (e.g. Carwardine et al, 2012), information on the actual effects of carnivore hunting or poisoning on biodiversity are needed, not just information on how one carnivore species might interact with another (for examples, see . Conversely, when claiming that large carnivore control must be implemented to reduce livestock predation, information on actual carnivore impacts and impact reduction is required to ethically justify carnivore control (Braysher, 1993;Allen et al, 2014b;Allen, 2017).…”

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“…Moreover, current methods commonly require experts to estimate the likely benefits of candidate management strategies using direct, probabilistic judgements (the 'probability of persistence' of a species; e.g. Carwardine et al, 2012;Joseph et al, 2009), which can be prone to error and bias (Lagnado & Sloman, 2004;O'Hagan et al, 2006;Bolger & Wright, 1994).…”

“…These approaches can include simple spreadsheet methods where the benefits of alternative management strategies are divided by their cost (e.g. Auerbach et al, 2014;Carwardine et al, 2012), algorithms which iteratively remove low-ranking strategies and update cost-efficiency rankings (e.g. Joseph et al, 2009;Chadés et al, 2015), and spatially explicit systematic conservation planning software that solve integer programming problems (e.g.…”