Use of surrogate species to cost‐effectively prioritize conservation actions

Abstract

Conservation efforts often focus on umbrella species whose distributions overlap with many other flora and fauna. However, because biodiversity is affected by different threats that are spatially variable, focusing only on the geographic range overlap of species may not be sufficient in allocating the necessary actions needed to efficiently abate threats. We developed a problem-based method for prioritizing conservation actions for umbrella species that maximizes the total number of flora and fauna benefiting from management while considering threats, actions, and costs. We tested our new method by assessing the performance of the Australian federal government's umbrella prioritization list, which identifies 73 umbrella species as priorities for conservation attention. Our results show that the federal government priority list benefits only 6% of all Australia's threatened terrestrial species. This could be increased to benefit nearly half (or 46%) of all threatened terrestrial species for the same budget of AU$550 million/year if more suitable umbrella species were chosen. This results in a 7-fold increase in management efficiency. We believe nations around the world can markedly improve the selection of prioritized umbrella species for conservation action with this transparent, quantitative, and objective prioritization approach.

Mapping habitat protection priority over a marine ecoregion under information gaps

“…Ecosystem‐based MCP at an ecoregion scale always faces challenges from incomplete data on biodiversity distributions, and hence adopts surrogates, assuming they will provide effective protection over key biodiversity patterns (Ferrari et al., 2018; Rodrigues & Brooks, 2007; Ward et al., 2019). A good surrogate selection strategy include adopting biological features with some ecological overlaps between surrogates and target features, reference to information extrapolated from field data (Rodrigues & Brooks, 2007), and associating habitat characteristics with defined species niches (Barton et al., 2020).…”

“…The major difficulty in building a holistic baseline comes from the vast spatial scale of the marine environment, particularly for an entire marine ecoregion (Spalding et al., 2007) that is not comprehensively and systematically surveyed (Huang et al., 2020). It may be necessary to use species whose habitat configurations encompass regional biodiversity patterns over a wide spatial area as MCP surrogates (Barton et al., 2020; Rodrigues & Brooks, 2007; Ward et al., 2019). The application of species distribution modelling (SDM) can help resolve gaps in the habitat configuration of those surrogates (Huang et al., 2020; Jackson‐Ricketts et al., 2020; Marshall et al., 2014).…”

“…Integrating threatened marine animal conservation with ecosystem‐based management, particularly using those threatened animals as surrogates, requires careful examination of following questions: is the information on the surrogates’ habitat configurations complete and unbiased; are the niches of selected surrogates associated with regional ecosystem features; and does the habitat protection planning based on threatened marine animals encompass major ecosystems (Barton et al., 2020; Rodrigues & Brooks, 2007; Ward et al., 2019)? Both coastal delphinids (humpback dolphins and Irrawaddy dolphins) and sea turtles are reported to be significantly associated with waters of high primary production and major ecosystems in tropical waters (Becker et al., 2019; Christianen et al., 2014; Jackson‐Ricketts et al., 2020; Jutapruet et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2017).…”

“…It may be necessary to use species whose habitat configurations encompass regional biodiversity patterns over a wide spatial area as MCP surrogates (Barton et al, 2020;Rodrigues & Brooks, 2007;Ward et al, 2019). The application of species distribution modelling (SDM) can help resolve gaps in the habitat configuration of those surrogates (Huang et al, 2020;Jackson-Ricketts et al, 2020;Marshall et al, 2014).…”

Systematic Review of the Roost-Site Characteristics of North American Forest Bats: Implications for Conservation

“…An additional 18% are "data-deficient", and 57% have unknown population trends, which results in a staggering 80% of global bat species with risk of extinction [16]. The number of species in need of conservation attention renders species-specific actions impractical at a large scale, making the development of management practices benefitting multiple species an important goal [17]. The use of umbrella species (a species whose conservation benefits co-occurring species and/or an ecosystem) may be a practical way to increase the number of bats receiving conservation benefits [18][19][20]; yet, few studies evaluate the potential of bats as conservation umbrellas (but see [21,22]).…”