Increasing Effectiveness of Conservation Decisions: A System and its Application

Abstract

All jurisdictions face a problem of effectively allocating scarce resources to conservation efforts. Key steps in improving allocation of conservation resources are establishing specific goals to guide conservation efforts, ensuring that those goals address the challenges of jurisdictional rarity, and creating tools that can assign species quickly to appropriate actions and rank species or ecosystems for conservation effort. We describe goals for conservation that assist resource allocation within jurisdictions and two tools to help the process. One tool sorts species into practical groups for conservation action. It creates groups of species requiring similar actions. The other tool assigns conservation priorities. It orders species or ecosystems based on criteria governing risk, modified by feasibility, stewardship responsibility, disjunctiveness, and pattern of range collapse. Priorities can be ordered within an action group, within a goal, or as an overall rank. Results of applying the approach are illustrated using examples from British Columbia.