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SummaryThe available tools and approaches to inform conservation decisions commonly assume detailed distribution data. We examine how well-established ecological concepts about patterns in local richness and community turnover can help overcome data limitations when planning future protected areas. To inform our analyses, we surveyed tree species in protected areas in the southern Appalachian Mountains in the eastern USA. We used the survey data to construct predictive models for alpha and beta diversity based on readily observed biophysical variables and combined them to create a heuristic that could predict among-site richness in trees (gamma diversity). The predictive models suggest that site elevation and latitude in this montane system explain much of the variation in alpha and beta diversity in tree species. We tested how well resulting protected areas would represent species if a conservation planner lacking detailed species inventories for candidate sites were to rely only on our alpha, beta and gamma diversity predictions. Our approach selected sites that, when aggregated, covered a large proportion of the overall species pool. The combined gamma diversity models performed even better when we also accounted for the cost of protecting sites. Our results demonstrate that classic community biogeography concepts remain highly relevant to conservation practice today.

Decision makers often cite data quality as a limitation in environmental management. Value of information approaches evaluate the benefit of new data collection for management outcomes. Pesticide exposure risk assessment for endangered species is one context where data limitations may affect decisions and a value of information type approach could be useful for identifying optimal data quality and resolution. Under the U.S. Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for registering pesticides before they can be sold and regularly reviewing pesticides. Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act requires that the EPA consider potential impacts of pesticides to listed endangered species and critical habitats in this process, and for the Services—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service—to complete a formal Section 7 consultation if the EPA deems it necessary. The current process is time‐intensive, lacks transparency and confidence among stakeholders, and leaves hundreds of unreviewed pesticides on the market. Increasing the resolution of pesticide usage data could address these concerns by improving estimated overlaps between species ranges and pesticide usage. Thus, we evaluated the relative importance of different resolutions of pesticide usage data for assessing expected carbaryl exposure to endangered plant species endemic to California. We found that spatially explicit, township resolution usage data (~36 mile2) excluded 33% of terrestrial plants (55/168) and 51% their critical habitats (27/53) from requiring a Section 7 consultation, while coarser resolution data excluded none. In contrast, the EPA's biological evaluation for carbaryl only excludes 4% of terrestrial plants (nationally) from requiring formal Section 7 consultation. This suggests high‐resolution data could increase pesticide review efficiency and decrease the amount of time pesticides remain on the market without a formal evaluation.

Innovation has the potential to enable conservation science and practice to keep pace with the escalating threats to global biodiversity, but this potential will only be realized if such innovations are designed and developed to fulfill specific needs and solve well-defined conservation problems. We propose that business-world strategies for assessing the practicality of innovation can be applied to assess the viability of innovations, such as new technology, for addressing biodiversity conservation challenges. Here, we outline a five-step, "lean start-up" based approach for considering conservation innovation from a business-planning perspective. Then, using three prominent conservation initiatives - Marxan (software), Conservation Drones (technology support), and Mataki (wildlife-tracking devices) - as case studies, we show how considering proposed initiatives from the perspective of a conceptual business model can support innovative technologies in achieving desired conservation outcomes.

Giving land managers the ability to predict invasion patterns can provide planning tools for acquisition and management of protected areas. We compared the effects of roads and streams, two substantial pathways for delivery of invasive plant propagules and sources of disturbance that may facilitate invasions, on the abundance of non-native invasive plants in 27 protected areas in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. As an extension of our road analysis, we also evaluated specific road type as a predictor of protected area invadedness. We found that road and stream predictors did not improve on a model that included only other covariates (e.g., distance to an urban area, average canopy cover, average slope, edge-to-interior ratio, percent agricultural land, and percent developed land). In this model, only percent agricultural land was marginally significant in predicting parcel invadedness. However, we found that four-wheel drive (4WD) roads did predict protected area invadedness well relative to other road types (primary, secondary, and local) and better than a covariates-only model. The role of 4WD road density in predicting protected area invadedness may be explained by their relation to recreation, the unmaintained nature of 4WD roads, or the accumulation of mud and plant materials on 4WD vehicles. Although we found overall streams and roads in general to be poor predictors of invadedness of protected areas by invasive plants, we do propose that our finding of a relationship between plant invasions and density of 4WD roads merits further investigation in the future.

Protected areas are a fundamental mechanism for conserving global biodiversity. Given limited conservation funds and shortfalls in funding for existing protected area management needs, a critical question is: should countries and states spend new funds on purchasing more land or managing existing protected areas to an acceptable standard? We used a non-spatial dynamic landscape model to compare the relative importance of expansion of protected areas versus improved protected area management in diverse contexts. We provide guidance on how to allocate funding across these two actions, and the order in which these actions should be prioritized. We discover that, in contrast with spending patterns, which focus on expansion rather than management, management is often the better first investment. The relative priority of expansion and management is determined by observable factors: the relative costs of the two actions and rates of degradation in protected and unprotected areas. Importantly, regardless of these factors, the final recommended action is always to split the budget across expansion and management such that there is adequate money for management. This highlights that, while our existing protected areas are an important asset, increased investment in management is essential to maximize their potential to protect biodiversity.

To achieve conservation objectives for threatened and endangered species, managers must choose among potential recovery actions based on their efficacy. Yet, a lack of standardization in defining how conservation actions support recovery objectives can impede action efficacy and inhibit the efficient allocation of resources across species and projects. It is especially difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of actions in U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) recovery plans due to variation in how actions are described across different plans. To address this issue, we examined our ability to apply the internationally supported Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) taxonomy to categorize existing ESA recovery plan action descriptions. Using ESA listed species in Arizona as a case study, we tested the feasibility of assigning CMP taxonomy categories to actions detailed in current recovery plans, and then used our assigned categories to assess the distribution of action categories. Pairs of researchers categorized and then compared levels of agreement between categories of recovery actions for 840 actions across 31 active recovery plans. Paired categorizations diverged for many of these actions, though confidence in action description assignments among pairs was highest in categorizing Research and Monitoring actions, which represented, on average, 53% (SD 0.9%) of actions with researcher agreement, and, on average, 42% (SD 0.08%) of classification among individual researchers. These results suggests that categorizable action descriptions most often correspond with Research and Monitoring objectives, and that other categories of actions required to delist species may be underrepresented in ESA recovery plans. We provide recommendations to support the application of the CMP taxonomy to current and future ESA recovery action descriptions using existing processes within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Our recommendations provide a roadmap for standardizing the description of recovery actions to improve decision‐support for ESA‐listed species.

Marine plastic pollution has emerged as one of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time. Although there has been a surge in global investment for implementing interventions to mitigate plastic pollution, there has been little attention given to the cost of these interventions. We developed a decision support framework to identify the economic, social, and ecological costs and benefits of plastic pollution interventions for different sectors and stakeholders. We calculated net cost as a function of six cost and benefit categories with the following equation: cost of implementing an intervention (direct, indirect, and nonmonetary costs) minus recovered costs and benefits (monetary and nonmonetary) produced by the interventions. We applied our framework to two quantitative case studies (a solid waste management plan and a trash interceptor) and four comparative case studies, evaluating the costs of beach cleanups and waste-to-energy plants in various contexts, to identify factors that influence the costs of plastic pollution interventions. The socioeconomic context of implementation, the spatial scale of implementation, and the time scale of evaluation all influence costs and the distribution of costs across stakeholders. Our framework provides an approach to estimate and compare the costs of a range of interventions across sociopolitical and economic contexts.Un Marco de Decisión para Estimar el Costo de Intervenciones en la Contaminación Marina por Plástico Resumen La contaminación marina por plásticos ha emergido como uno de los retos ambientales más prioritarios de nuestro tiempo. Mientras ha habido un aumento en la inversión global para implementar intervenciones para mitigar la contaminación por plásticos, se ha dado poca atención al costo de estas intervenciones. Desarrollamos un marco de soporte a las decisiones para identificar los costos y beneficios económicos, sociales y ecológicos de las intervenciones en la contaminación por plástico para diferentes sectores y partes interesadas. Calculamos el costo neto como una función de 6 categorías de costo y beneficio con la siguiente ecuación: costo de la implementación de una intervención (costos directos, indirectos y no monetarios) menos los costos y beneficios recuperados (monetarios y no monetarios) producidos por las intervenciones. Aplicamos nuestro marco a 2 estudios de caso cuantitativos (un plan de manejo de residuos sólidos y un interceptor de basura) y 4 casos de estudio comparativos evaluando los costos de limpieza de playas y plantas de transformación de desechos a energía en varios contextos para identificar los factores que influyen en los costos de las intervenciones de la contaminación por plástico. El contexto socioeconómico de la implementación, la escala espacial de la implementación y la escala de tiempo de evaluación influyen en los costos y distribución de costos entre las partes interesadas. Nuestro marco proporciona una aproximación para estimar y comparar los costos de una gama de intervenciones en contextos sociopolíticos y económicos.摘要: 海洋塑料污染已成为本时代最紧迫的环境挑战之一。虽然全球在实施干预措施以减轻塑料污染方面的投资激增, 但很少有人关注这些干预措施的成本。我们开发了一个决策支持框架, 以确定塑料污染干预措施对不同部门和利益相关方在经济、社会和生态方面的成本和收益。我们计算净成本作为六种成本及收益类别之间的函数, 计算公式如下: 实施干预的成本 (直接、间接及非货币成本) 减去干预产生的回收成本和收益 (货币及非货币) 。我们将该框架应用于两个定量案例研究 (固体废物管理计划和垃圾拦截器) 和四个比较案例研究, 评估在不同环境下海滩清理和将垃圾转化为能源工厂的成本, 以确定影响塑料污染干预成本的因素。我们发现, 实施干预措施的社会经济背景、空间尺度和评估的时间尺度都会影响成本及成本在利益相关方之间的分配情况。我们的框架为估计和比较一系列跨社会政治和经济背景的干预措施成本提供了方法。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】.

Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual model of private land conservation decision-making that integrates theoretical perspectives from three dominant disciplines: economics, sociology, and psychology. The model highlights how heterogeneity in behavior across decision-makers is driven by interactions between the decision context, attributes of potential conservation behaviors, and attributes of the decision-maker. These differences in both individual attributes and context shape decision-makers’ constraints and the potential and perceived consequences of a behavior. The model also captures how perceived consequences are evaluated and weighted through a decision-making process that may range from systematic to heuristic, ultimately resulting in selection of a behavior. Outcomes of private land behaviors across the landscape feed back to alter the socio-environmental conditions that shape future decisions. The conceptual model is designed to facilitate better communication, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and points to methodological innovations that can expand understanding of private land decision-making. The model also can be used to illuminate how behavior change interventions (e.g., policies, regulations, technical assistance) could be designed to target different drivers to encourage environmentally and socially beneficial behaviors on private lands.

Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the potential benefits of conservation interventions, but explicit quantification of the financial costs of implementation is rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means published values are difficult to interpret. This reporting deficiency hinders progress toward a collective understanding of the financial costs of management interventions across projects and thus limits the ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We devised a standardized approach to describing financial costs reported for conservation interventions. The standards call for researchers and practitioners to describe the objective and outcome, context and methods, and scale of costed interventions and to state which categories of costs are included and the currency and date for reported costs. These standards aim to provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the cost data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals so that cost reporting is comparable among studies. This would support shared learning and enhance the ability to identify and perform cost‐effective conservation.

Policy guidelines for creating new protected areas commonly recommend larger protected areas be favored. We examine whether these recommendations are justified, providing the first evaluation of this question to use return-on-investment (ROI) methods that account for how protected area size influences multiple ecological benefits and the economic costs of protection. We examine areas acquired to protect forested ecosystems in the eastern US that are rich in endemic species. ROI analyses often alter recommendations about protected area size from those obtained when considering only ecological benefits or only economic costs. Large protected areas offer a greater ecological return per dollar invested if the goal of protecting sites is to reduce forest fragmentation on the wider landscape, whereas smaller sites offer a higher ROI when prioritizing sites offering protection to more species. A portfolio of site sizes may need to be included in protected area networks when multiple objectives motivate conservation.

Environmental managers regularly face decisions about how to counteract threats. These decisions require an understanding of both the conservation benefits and economic costs of candidate actions. However, transparent frameworks for how to accurately calculate costs for management are rare. We worked with island managers in Australia to develop eradication protocols for six invasive species- four mammals and two weeds. We used the protocols to create an accounting framework for invasive species eradications to produce realistic cost estimates for eradications across multiple locations. We also used our models to test common cost assumptions: (1) that costs scale linearly with area, (2) that terrain does not influence costs, and (3) that eradication costs stay constant through time. By explicating testing assumptions, we found that costs largely scaled linearly with area, that terrain influences costs, and that costs decline as populations decline in response to ongoing management. Estimated mammal eradication costs were driven in large part by the area of an island and the cost of transport. However, when area alone was used as a proxy for costs, the calculated costs deviated from our modelled costs by 40–56%. Weed eradication cost estimates were driven by the size and density of an infestation as well as the terrain of the island, with the effect of terrain becoming more pronounced as area to be treated increased. We provide a method to calculate realistic costs across several sites, which can be used to guide strategic management decision-making, including prioritisation, and on-ground management actions.

Achieving global targets for restoring native vegetation cover requires restoration projects to identify and work toward common management objectives. This is made challenging by the different values held by concerned stakeholders, which are not often accounted for. Additionally, restoration is time-dependent and yet there is often little explicit acknowledgment of the time frames required to achieve outcomes. Here, we argue that explicitly incorporating value and time considerations into stated objectives would help to achieve restoration goals. We reviewed the peer-reviewed literature on restoration of terrestrial vegetation and found that while there is guidance on how to identify and account for stakeholder values and time considerations, there is little evidence these are being incorporated into decision-making processes. In this article, we explore how a combination of stakeholder surveys and workshops can be used within a structured decision-making framework to facilitate the integration of diverse stakeholder values and time frame considerations to set restoration objectives. We demonstrate this approach with a case of restoration decision-making at a regional scale (southeast Queensland, Australia) with a view to this experience supporting similar restoration projects elsewhere.

Explicit articulation of values and objectives is critical

De-extinction technology that brings back extinct species, or variants on extinct species, is becoming a reality with significant implications for biodiversity conservation. If extinction could be reversed there are potential conservation benefits and costs that need to be carefully considered before such action is taken. Here, we use a conservation prioritization framework to identify and discuss some factors that would be important if de-extinction of species for release into the wild were a viable option within an overall conservation strategy. We particularly focus on how de-extinction could influence the choices that a management agency would make with regard to the risks and costs of actions, and how these choices influence other extant species that are managed in the same system. We suggest that a decision science approach will allow for choices that are critical to the implementation of a drastic conservation action, such as de-extinction, to be considered in a deliberate manner while identifying possible perverse consequences.

Biodiversity conservation projects confront immediate and escalating threats with limited funding. Conservation theory suggests that the best response to the species extinction crisis is to spend money as soon as it becomes available, and this is often an explicit constraint placed on funding. We use a general dynamic model of a conservation landscape to show that this decision to “front-load” project spending can be suboptimal if a delay allows managers to use resources more strategically. Our model demonstrates the existence of temporal efficiencies in conservation management, which parallel the spatial efficiencies identified by systematic conservation planning. The optimal timing of decisions balances the rate of biodiversity decline (e.g., the relaxation of extinction debts, or the progress of climate change) against the rate at which spending appreciates in value (e.g., through interest, learning, or capacity building). We contrast the benefits of acting and waiting in two ecosystems where restoration can mitigate forest bird extinction debts: South Australia’s Mount Lofty Ranges and Paraguay’s Atlantic Forest. In both cases, conservation outcomes cannot be maximized by front-loading spending, and the optimal solution recommends substantial delays before managers undertake conservation actions. Surprisingly, these delays allow superior conservation benefits to be achieved, in less time than front-loading. Our analyses provide an intuitive and mechanistic rationale for strategic delay, which contrasts with the orthodoxy of front-loaded spending for conservation actions. Our results illustrate the conservation efficiencies that could be achieved if decision makers choose when to spend their limited resources, as opposed to just where to spend them.

Abstract ContextTo understand the ecological consequences of predator management, reliable and accurate methods are needed to survey and detect predators and the species with which they interact. Recently, poison baits have been developed specifically for lethal and broad-scale control of feral cats in Australia. However, the potential non-target effects of these baits on other predators, including native apex predators (dingoes), and, in turn, cascading effects on lower trophic levels (large herbivores), are poorly understood. AimsWe examined the effect that variation in camera trapping-survey design has on detecting dingoes, feral cats and macropodids, and how different habitat types affect species occurrences. We then examined how a feral cat poison baiting event influences the occupancy of these sympatric species. MethodsWe deployed 80 remotely triggered camera traps over the 2410-km2 Matuwa Indigenous Protected Area, in the semiarid rangelands of Western Australia, and used single-season site-occupancy models to calculate detection probabilities and occupancy for our target species before and after baiting. Key resultsCameras placed on roads were ~60 times more likely to detect dingoes and feral cats than were off-road cameras, whereas audio lures designed to attract feral cats had only a slight positive effect on detection for all target species. Habitat was a significant factor affecting the occupancy of dingoes and macropodids, but not feral cats, with both species being positively associated with open woodlands. Poison baiting to control feral cats did not significantly reduce their occupancy but did so for dingoes, whereas macropodid occupancy increased following baiting and reduced dingo occupancy. ConclusionsCamera traps on roads greatly increase the detection probabilities for predators, whereas audio lures appear to add little or no value to increasing detection for any of the species we targeted. Poison baiting of an invasive mesopredator appeared to negatively affect a non-target, native apex predator, and, in turn, may have resulted in increased activity of large herbivores. ImplicationsManagement and monitoring of predators must pay careful attention to survey design, and lethal control of invasive mesopredators should be approached cautiously so as to avoid potential unintended negative ecological consequences (apex-predator suppression and herbivore release).

Aim: Invasive species management is an expensive priority on many protected areas but the magnitude of invasion can vary drastically from site to site. Conservation planners must consider this variability when they plan for treatment across multiple protected areas. We examine the scope for predicting site invadedness and management costs from common protected area characteristics, a method that could be used to estimate the future management needs of a protected area network. Location: Three hundred and sixty-five protected areas across the state of Florida, USA. Methods: We use data on invasive plant cover and protected area features to predict invadedness and invasive species management funding allocation in a multiple regression framework. We then examine the relationship between invadedness and funding on a subset of 46 of the protected areas. Results: Invadedness (relative proportion of a protected area that is covered by invasive plants) was related to the size of a protected area and the number of surrounding households. However, the explained variation (9-50%) depended on the type of species occurrence data used; with models using approximated data on the area infested able to explain more of the variation than those that included data with GIS-calculated area infested. Cumulative funding investment at a protected area was also predicted by the number of surrounding households and protected area size. Yet, funding and invadedness were not correlated with one another. Main conclusions: Readily available data on protected area features were statistically related to variation in the invadedness of a protected area and were also associated with past management expenditures. This does not translate into a clear relationship between current invadedness and past expenditures, however. Our results suggest that basing predictions of future costs on current funding may not accurately represent budgetary needs.

The herbaceous ground cover of the longleaf pine ecosystem harbors the highest plant species richness in North America, with up to 50 species per square meter, but the mechanisms that regulate this diversity are not well understood. In this system, variability in seedling recruitment events may best explain the extremely high small-scale species richness and its relationship to soil moisture and system net primary productivity. To understand the potential mechanistic controls on species richness, we used a long-term resource manipulation study across a natural soil moisture gradient to assess environmental controls on seedling recruitment. We considered the availability of resources to be an indicator of seedling safe-site supply, and also manipulated seed availability to examine the relative importance of recruitment limitations on seedling diversity. We found that water availability regulated the number of species in the seedling community regardless of the underlying natural moisture gradient, and that this effect may result from differential responses of seedling guilds to resource availability. Water supply was more important than seed supply in determining seedling establishment, suggesting that appropriate sites for regeneration are a factor limiting seedling success. This is the first study that shows that the episodic supply of microsites for recruitment could influence species richness in the highly threatened and biodiverse longleaf pine savanna.

Facilitative interactions between neighboring plants can influence community composition, especially in locations where environmental stress is a factor limiting competitive effects. The longleaf pine savanna of the southeastern United States is a threatened and diverse system where seedling recruitment success and understory species richness levels are regulated by the availability of moist microsites. We hypothesized that the dominant bunch grass species (Aristida stricta Michx.) would facilitate moist seedling microsites through shading, but that the effect would depend on stress gradients. Here, we examined the environmental properties modified by the presence of wiregrass and tested the importance of increased shade as a potential facilitative mechanism promoting seedling recruitment across spatial and temporal stress gradients. We showed that environmental gradients, season, and experimental water manipulation influence seedling success. Environmental properties were modified by wiregrass proximity in a manner that could facilitate seedling success, but we showed that shade alone does not provide a facilitative benefit to seedlings in this system.

Coreopsis bakeri (Asteraceae; Coreopsideae), an early blooming and very narrow-leaved perennial restricted to rare limestone glade habitats in northern Florida, is described as new. The plants most closely resemble Coreopsis lanceolata, a common species of the southeastern U.S., but have narrower, glabrous, and infolded leaves. In addition to phenotypic differences, the two species show divergence at two nuclear genes, the nuclear ITS and ETS regions, and for two chloroplast intergenic spacers (psbA-trnH and rpl32-trnL). Because of the rarity of C. bakeri and the very limited extent of its distinctive habitat, this species is in urgent need of protection. In addition, C. lanceolata is found in open areas near the limestone glades, and poses a potential threat through competition or hybridization.

Invasive species are a management concern on protected areas worldwide. Conservation managers need to predict infestations of invasive plants they aim to treat if they want to plan for long term management. Many studies predict the presence of invasive species, but predictions of cover are more relevant for management. Here we examined how predictors of invasive plant presence and cover differ across species that vary in their management priority. To do so, we used data on management effort and cover of invasive plant species on central Florida protected areas. Using a zero-inflated multiple regression framework, we showed that protected area features can predict the presence and cover of the focal species but the same features rarely explain both. There were several predictors of either presence or cover that were important across multiple species. Protected areas with three days of frost per year or fewer were more likely to have occurrences of four of the six focal species. When invasive plants were present, their proportional cover was greater on small preserves for all species, and varied with surrounding household density for three species. None of the predictive features were clearly related to whether species were prioritized for management or not. Our results suggest that predictors of cover and presence can differ both within and across species but do not covary with management priority. We conclude that conservation managers need to select predictors of invasion with care as species identity can determine the relationship between predictors of presence and the more management relevant predictors of cover.