Abstract
Article 8 of the Convention on Biological Diversity obliges contracting parties to establish protected areas for conservation. This can be achieved in smaller networks of reserves if their design is based on how well different sites complement one another biologically, rather than on more commonly used criteria, such as species richness or simple availability for acquisition1,2. However, this increase in efficiency3 requires species lists for each candidate site, and obtaining such data can be expensive; for example, a detailed survey of five taxa across 15,000 km2 of forest in Uganda took nearly 100 person-years and cost about US$1 million4,5. Here we ask whether investing in such surveys makes economic sense, or whether conservation agencies would be better advised to continue following more traditional reserve selection procedures, at the cost of having to conserve larger reserve networks.
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