Abstract
Conservation strategies based on charismatic flagship species, such as tigers, lions, and elephants, successfully attract funding from individuals and corporate donors. However, critics of this species-focused approach argue it wastes resources and often does not benefit broader biodiversity. If true, then the best way of raising conservation funds excludes the best way of spending it. Here we show that this conundrum can be resolved, and that the flagship species approach does not impede cost-effective conservation. Through a tailored prioritization approach, we identify places containing flagship species while also maximizing global biodiversity representation (based on 19,616 terrestrial and freshwater species). We then compare these results to scenarios that only maximized biodiversity representation, and demonstrate that our flagship-based approach achieves 79−89% of our objective. This provides strong evidence that prudently selected flagships can both raise funds for conservation and help target where these resources are best spent to conserve biodiversity.
Highlights
Background speciesIn addition to mammals, birds and reptiles, background species comprised all freshwater crustaceans, carnivorous insects, and amphibians for which International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) distribution polygons exist in our scenarios (i.e. N = 19,616)
We identified 534 species of mammals, birds and reptiles as candidate flagships (Supplementary Data Table 1), of which 338 were NearThreatened or higher according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List (Supplementary Table 1)
There were 10,200 places that fell within globally unique ecoregions, 3097 of which overlapped with protected areas, 3961 overlapped with regions of low human impact and 1068 overlapped with both protected areas and low human impact
Summary
Birds and reptiles, background species comprised all freshwater crustaceans, carnivorous insects, and amphibians for which IUCN distribution polygons exist in our scenarios (i.e. N = 19,616). We followed an existing approach of Butchart et al.[49] and retained those parts of their distributions marked as either native or re-introduced, and with presence coded as extant, possibly extant, or possibly extinct. We created a presence−absence matrix for both the candidate and background species based. G200 Ecoregions + Protected Areas d e. G200 Ecoregions + Human Footprint f g. G200 Ecoregions + Protected Areas + Human Footprint h Footprint Number of places. All IUCN threat status All IUCN threat status All IUCN threat status All
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