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.
Highlights
Many sophisticated approaches exist for identifying priority areas for conservation at a global scale
Recent theoretical advances incorporate economic considerations and landscape dynamics into priority-setting, and provide an analytical framework for deciding where, when, and how much money should be invested for biodiversity conservation [4,5,6,7,8]
There is no framework for guiding the allocation of funds among alternative conservation actions that address specific threats
Summary
Many sophisticated approaches exist for identifying priority areas for conservation at a global scale These ‘‘biodiversity hotspots’’ or ‘‘crisis ecoregions’’ are typically identified using data on endemic species richness, total biodiversity, and past habitat conversion [1,2,3]. With few exceptions, these approaches neglect economic costs and provide a static assessment of conservation priorities. Recent theoretical advances incorporate economic considerations and landscape dynamics into priority-setting, and provide an analytical framework for deciding where, when, and how much money should be invested for biodiversity conservation [4,5,6,7,8] While these theoretical advances incorporate economic considerations, they treat land acquisition, or the creation of protected areas, as a surrogate for the broader suite of actions available to protect biodiversity. Such a framework could help to allocate limited conservation funds to threat-specific conservation actions in areas where they are likely to achieve the greatest potential biodiversity benefit
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