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Plans for expanding protected area systems (prioritizations) need to fulfill conservation objectives. They also need to account for other factors, such as economic feasibility and anthropogenic land-use requirements. Although prioritizations are often generated with decision support tools, most tools have limitations that hinder their use for decision-making. We outlined how the prioritizr R package (https://prioritizr.net) can be used for systematic conservation prioritization. This decision support tool provides a flexible interface to build conservation planning problems. It can leverage a variety of commercial (e.g., Gurobi) and open-source (e.g., CBC and SYMPHONY) exact algorithm solvers to identify optimal solutions in a short period. It is also compatible with a variety of spatially explicit (e.g., ESRI Shapefile, GeoTIFF) and nonspatial tabular (e.g., Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet) data formats. Additionally, it provides functionality for evaluating prioritizations, such as assessing the relative importance of different places selected by a prioritization. To showcase the prioritizr R package, we applied it to a case study based in Washington state (United States) for which we developed a prioritization to improve protected area coverage of native avifauna. We accounted for land acquisition costs, existing protected areas, places that might not be suitable for protected area establishment, and spatial fragmentation. We also conducted a benchmark analysis to examine the performance of different solvers. The prioritization identified 12,400 km 2 of priority areas for increasing the percentage of species' distributions covered by protected areas. Although open source and commercial solvers were able to quickly solve large-scale conservation planning problems, commercial solvers were required for complex, large-scale problems.. The prioritizr R package is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). In addition to reserve selection, it can inform habitat restoration, connectivity enhancement, and ecosystem service provisioning. It has been used in numerous conservation planning exercises to inform best practices and aid real-world decision-making., (© 2024 The Author(s). Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.)

The hypothesis that species' ranges are limited by interspecific competition has motivated decades of debate, but a general answer remains elusive. Here we test this hypothesis for lowland tropical birds by examining species' precipitation niche breadths. We focus on precipitation because it-not temperature-is the dominant climate variable that shapes the biota of the lowland tropics. We used 3.6 million fine-scale citizen science records from eBird to measure species' precipitation niche breadths in 19 different regions across the globe. Consistent with the predictions of the interspecific competition hypothesis, multiple lines of evidence show that species have narrower precipitation niches in regions with more species. This means species inhabit more specialized precipitation niches in species-rich regions. We predict this niche specialization should make tropical species in high diversity regions disproportionately vulnerable to changes in precipitation regimes; preliminary empirical evidence is consistent with this prediction., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature's contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. We find that conserving approximately half of global land area through protection or sustainable management could provide 90% of the current levels of ten of nature's contributions to people and meet minimum representation targets for 26,709 terrestrial vertebrate species. This finding supports recent commitments by national governments under the Global Biodiversity Framework to conserve at least 30% of global lands and waters, and proposals to conserve half of the Earth. More than one-third of areas required for conserving nature's contributions to people and species are also highly suitable for agriculture, renewable energy, oil and gas, mining, or urban expansion. This indicates potential conflicts among conservation, climate and development goals., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Xing et al. ( 1 ) create new variables and fit models to argue against the hypothesis that interspecific competition shapes species' elevational ranges. However, their key newly created variable is best interpreted as a proxy for the important variable of the interspecific competition hypothesis. Thus, their reanalysis uncovers the patterns we already described that are consistent with the interspecific competition hypothesis.

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems and processes that underpin human wellbeing is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we define critical natural assets as the natural and semi-natural ecosystems that provide 90% of the total current magnitude of 14 types of nature's contributions to people (NCP), and we map the global locations of these critical natural assets at 2 km resolution. Critical natural assets for maintaining local-scale NCP (12 of the 14 NCP) account for 30% of total global land area and 24% of national territorial waters, while 44% of land area is required to also maintain two global-scale NCP (carbon storage and moisture recycling). These areas overlap substantially with cultural diversity (areas containing 96% of global languages) and biodiversity (covering area requirements for 73% of birds and 66% of mammals). At least 87% of the world's population live in the areas benefitting from critical natural assets for local-scale NCP, while only 16% live on the lands containing these assets. Many of the NCP mapped here are left out of international agreements focused on conserving species or mitigating climate change, yet this analysis shows that explicitly prioritizing critical natural assets and the NCP they provide could simultaneously advance development, climate and conservation goals., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Species' geographic ranges are limited by climate and species interactions. Climate is the prevailing explanation for why species live only within narrow elevational ranges in megadiverse biodiverse tropical mountains, but competition can also restrict species' elevational ranges. We test contrasting predictions of these hypotheses by conducting a global comparative test of birds' elevational range sizes within 31 montane regions, using more than 4.4 million citizen science records from eBird to define species' elevational ranges in each region. We find strong support that competition, not climate, is the leading driver of narrow elevational ranges. These results highlight the importance of species interactions in shaping species' ranges in tropical mountains, Earth's hottest biodiversity hotspots.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in extraordinary declines in human mobility, which, in turn, may affect wildlife. Using records of more than 4.3 million birds observed by volunteers from March to May 2017–2020 across Canada and the United States, we found that counts of 66 (80%) of 82 focal bird species changed in pandemic-altered areas, usually increasing in comparison to prepandemic abundances in urban habitat, near major roads and airports, and in counties where lockdowns were more pronounced or occurred at the same time as peak bird migration. Our results indicate that human activity affects many of North America’s birds and suggest that we could make urban spaces more attractive to birds by reducing traffic and mitigating the disturbance from human transportation after we emerge from the pandemic.

Many animals produce coordinated signals, but few are more striking than the elaborate male-female vocal duets produced by some tropical songbirds. Yet, little is known about the factors driving the extreme levels of vocal coordination between mated pairs in these taxa. We examined evolutionary patterns of duet coordination and their potential evolutionary drivers in Neotropical wrens (Troglodytidae), a songbird family well known for highly coordinated duets. Across 23 wren species, we show that the degree of coordination and precision with which pairs combine their songs into duets varies by species. This includes some species that alternate their song phrases with exceptional coordination to produce rapidly alternating duets that are highly consistent across renditions. These highly coordinated, consistent duets evolved independently in multiple wren species. Duet coordination and consistency are greatest in species with especially long breeding seasons, but neither duet coordination nor consistency are correlated with clutch size, conspecific abundance or vegetation density. These results suggest that tightly coordinated duets play an important role in mediating breeding behaviour, possibly by signalling commitment or coalition of the pair to mates and other conspecifics.

Tropical birds are purported to be longer lived than their temperate counterparts, but it has not been shown whether avian survival rates covary with latitude worldwide. Here, we perform a global-scale meta-analysis of 949 estimates from 204 studies of avian survival and demonstrate that a latitudinal survival gradient exists in the northern hemisphere, is dampened or absent for southern hemisphere species, and that differences between passerines and nonpasserines largely drive these trends. We also show that while extrinsic factors related to climate were poor predictors of apparent survival compared to latitude alone, the relationship between apparent survival and latitude is strongly mediated by intrinsic traits - large-bodied species and species with smaller clutch size had the highest apparent survival. Our findings reveal that differences among intrinsic traits and whether species were passerines or nonpasserines surpass latitude and its underlying climatic factors in explaining global patterns of apparent avian survival., (© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The resources available for conserving biodiversity are limited, and so protected areas need to be established in places that will achieve objectives for minimal cost. Two of the main algorithms for solving systematic conservation planning problems are Simulated Annealing (SA) and exact integer linear programing (EILP) solvers. Using a case study in BC, Canada, we compare the cost-effectiveness and processing times of SA used in Marxan versus EILP using both commercial and open-source algorithms. Plans for expanding protected area systems based on EILP algorithms were 12-30% cheaper than plans using SA, due to EILP's ability to find optimal solutions as opposed to approximations. The best EILP solver we examined was on average 1,071 times faster than the SA algorithm tested. The performance advantages of EILP solvers were also observed when we aimed for spatially compact solutions by including a boundary penalty. One practical advantage of using EILP over SA is that the analysis does not require calibration, saving even more time. Given the performance of EILP solvers, they can be used to generate conservation plans in real-time during stakeholder meetings and can facilitate rapid sensitivity analysis, and contribute to a more transparent, inclusive, and defensible decision-making process., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© 2020 Schuster et al.)

Decision-support tools are commonly used to maximize return on investments (ROI) in conservation. We evaluated how the relative value of information on biodiversity features and land cost varied with data structure and variability, attributes of focal species and conservation targets, and habitat suitability thresholds for contrasting bird communities in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Specifically, we used spatial distribution maps for 20 bird species, land values, and an integer linear programming model to prioritize land units (1 km 2 ) that met conservation targets at the lowest estimated cost (hereafter 'efficiency'). Across scenarios, the relative value of biodiversity data increased with conservation targets, as higher thresholds for suitable habitat were applied, and when focal species occurred disproportionately on land of high assessed value. Incorporating land cost generally improved planning efficiency, but at diminishing rates as spatial variance in biodiversity features relative to land cost increased. Our results offer a precise, empirical demonstration of how spatially-optimized planning solutions are influenced by spatial variation in underlying feature layers. We also provide guidance to planners seeking to maximize efficiency in data acquisition and resolve potential trade-offs when setting targets and thresholds in financially-constrained, spatial planning efforts aimed at maximizing ROI in biodiversity conservation.

Protected areas form the cornerstone of global efforts to conserve biodiversity. Most current methods for designing reserve networks focus on maximizing the representation of species, but with no assurance that those species will persist in the protected landscapes into the future. We present a new strategy for reserve design that combines metapopulation theory with spatial conservation prioritization to estimate conservation solutions that minimize extinction risk across numerous species simultaneously. Our framework optimizes the spatial configuration of reserves to maximize metapopulation persistence for an entire assemblage of species by accounting for both species representation and landscape connectivity. As a case study, we design a reserve network for 114 terrestrial mammal species in Indonesian New Guinea. Our approach builds on Marxan, the flagship representation-based reserve design tool, improving estimated persistence (metapopulation capacity) by an average of 4.6-fold across species, without increasing the socioeconomic cost. We suggest that enhancing species persistence, rather than protecting arbitrary proportions of species' ranges, should be the ultimate objective of conservation planning., (© 2018 by the Ecological Society of America.)

The responses of lowland tropical communities to climate change will critically influence global biodiversity but remain poorly understood. If species in these systems are unable to tolerate warming, the communities-currently the most diverse on Earth-may become depauperate ('biotic attrition'). In response to temperature changes, animals can adjust their distribution in space or their activity in time, but these two components of the niche are seldom considered together. We assessed the spatio-temporal niches of rainforest mammal species in Borneo across gradients in elevation and temperature. Most species are not predicted to experience changes in spatio-temporal niche availability, even under pessimistic warming scenarios. Responses to temperature are not predictable by phylogeny but do appear to be trait-based, being much more variable in smaller-bodied taxa. General circulation models and weather station data suggest unprecedentedly high midday temperatures later in the century; predicted responses to this warming among small-bodied species range from 9% losses to 6% gains in spatio-temporal niche availability, while larger species have close to 0% predicted change. Body mass may therefore be a key ecological trait influencing the identity of climate change winners and losers. Mammal species composition will probably change in some areas as temperatures rise, but full-scale biotic attrition this century appears unlikely., (© 2017 The Author(s).)