Abstract
Spatial data characteristics have the potential to influence various aspects of prioritising biodiversity areas for systematic conservation planning. There has been some exploration of the combined effects of size of planning units and level of classification of physical environments on the pattern and extent of priority areas. However, these data characteristics have yet to be explicitly investigated in terms of their interaction with different socioeconomic cost data during the spatial prioritisation process. We quantify the individual and interacting effects of three factors—planning-unit size, thematic resolution of reef classes, and spatial variability of socioeconomic costs—on spatial priorities for marine conservation, in typical marine planning exercises that use reef classification maps as a proxy for biodiversity. We assess these factors by creating 20 unique prioritisation scenarios involving combinations of different levels of each factor. Because output data from these scenarios are analogous to ecological data, we applied ecological statistics to determine spatial similarities between reserve designs. All three factors influenced prioritisations to different extents, with cost variability having the largest influence, followed by planning-unit size and thematic resolution of reef classes. The effect of thematic resolution on spatial design depended on the variability of cost data used. In terms of incidental representation of conservation objectives derived from finer-resolution data, scenarios prioritised with uniform cost outperformed those prioritised with variable cost. Following our analyses, we make recommendations to help maximise the spatial and cost efficiency and potential effectiveness of future marine conservation plans in similar planning scenarios. We recommend that planners: employ the smallest planning-unit size practical; invest in data at the highest possible resolution; and, when planning across regional extents with the intention of incidentally representing fine-resolution features, prioritise the whole region with uniform costs rather than using coarse-resolution data on variable costs.
Highlights
IntroductionSystematic conservation planning (hereafter “conservation planning”) can be described in stages from stakeholder engagement through to the application and maintenance of conservation actions [1, 2]
Systematic conservation planning can be described in stages from stakeholder engagement through to the application and maintenance of conservation actions [1, 2]
We found that solutions with variable cost were more sensitive to increasing thematic resolutions than those with uniform cost
Summary
Systematic conservation planning (hereafter “conservation planning”) can be described in stages from stakeholder engagement through to the application and maintenance of conservation actions [1, 2]. A key stage in conservation planning is prioritising important areas for biodiversity conservation (hereafter “prioritisation”). Conservation prioritisations are important in guiding efficient investment of limited resources to design protected areas and off-park interventions for conservation [3, 4]. Prioritising allows planners to quantitatively assess the importance of sites for conservation action, while explicitly considering aspects of their socioeconomic context. Prioritisations are typically based on data on biodiversity and, more recently, socioeconomic costs, coupled with predefined quantitative objectives for environmental classes, species, or processes of interest [5, 6]. Data on biodiversity and socioeconomic costs, intersected with planning units, and combined with objectives, are analysed by decision-support tools that determine low- or least-cost conservation designs [7]
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