Abstract
The combination of rapid biodiversity loss and limited funds available for conservation represents a major global concern. While there are many approaches for conservation prioritization, few are framed as financial optimization problems. We use recently published avian data to conduct a global analysis of the financial resources required to conserve different quantities of phylogenetic diversity (PD). We introduce a new prioritization metric (ADEPD) that After Downlisting a species gives the Expected Phylogenetic Diversity at some future time. Unlike other metrics, ADEPD considers the benefits to future PD associated with downlisting a species (e.g. moving from Endangered to Vulnerable in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List). Combining ADEPD scores with data on the financial cost of downlisting different species provides a cost–benefit prioritization approach for conservation. We find that under worst-case spending $3915 can save 1 year of PD, while under optimal spending $1 can preserve over 16.7 years of PD. We find that current conservation spending patterns are only expected to preserve one quarter of the PD that optimal spending could achieve with the same total budget. Maximizing PD is only one approach within the wider goal of biodiversity conservation, but our analysis highlights more generally the danger involved in uninformed spending of limited resources.
Highlights
Conservation researchers and practitioners are widely aware that efforts to combat the current global biodiversity crisis and conserve threatened species are limited in practical terms by major financial constraints [1]
We introduce a conservation prioritization method named ‘after downlisting expected phylogenetic diversity’ (ADEPD), which represents a measure of the change in the total expected future PD after a species is downlisted by one International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List category
PD is only one of many components of biodiversity, such as species richness, feature diversity and intrinsic value, which may not be closely related across wider species groupings, habitats or geographical regions that are targeted for conservation [5]
Summary
Conservation researchers and practitioners are widely aware that efforts to combat the current global biodiversity crisis and conserve threatened species are limited in practical terms by major financial constraints [1]. The costs necessary to reduce extinction risk by at least one Red List category within a 10 year timeframe have, recently been estimated on the basis of relevant expert knowledge for a cohort of 210 globally threatened (Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered) bird species, constituting 19% of all threatened birds [2], for which comparative phylogenetic data are available [13,30] We use these independent sets of data to determine an explicit returnon-investment to maximize the cost-effective conservation of PD. We used data on conservation expenditure for the cohort of 206 species over the past decade [2] to explore the estimated future gain in EPD if this budget was maintained for the 10 years by multiplying the associated past species-specific expenditure with its ADEPD-cost score for each tree, assuming a linear response of EPD gain to unit cost spent This provided an average amount of ranking by EDGE score rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org Phil. All modelling was scripted in R v. 3.0.0 [37], but using existing R functions and packages where stated [36]
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