Maximising return on conservation investment in the conterminous USA

Efficient conservation planning requires knowledge about conservation targets, threats to those targets, costs of conservation and the marginal return to additional conservation efforts. Systematic conservation planning typically only takes a small piece of this complex puzzle into account. Here, we use a return‐on‐investment (ROI) approach to prioritise lands for conservation at the county level in the conterminous USA. Our approach accounts for species richness, county area, the proportion of species' ranges already protected, the threat of land conversion and land costs. Areas selected by a complementarity‐based greedy heuristic using our full ROI approach provided greater averted species losses per dollar spent compared with areas selected by heuristics accounting for richness alone or richness and cost, and avoided acquiring lands not threatened with conversion. In contrast to traditional prioritisation approaches, our results highlight conservation bargains, opportunities to avert the threat of development and places where conservation efforts are currently lacking.     

Fauna habitat modelling and mapping: A review and case study in the Lower Hunter Central Coast region of NSW

Abstract Habitat models are now broadly used in conservation planning on public lands. If implemented correctly, habitat modelling is a transparent and repeatable technique for describing and mapping biodiversity values, and its application in peri‐urban and agricultural landscape planning is likely to expand rapidly. Conservation planning in such landscapes must be robust to the scrutiny that arises when biodiversity constraints are placed on developers and private landholders. A standardized modelling and model evaluation method based on widely accepted techniques will improve the robustness of conservation plans. We review current habitat modelling and model evaluation methods and provide a habitat modelling case study in the New South Wales central coast region that we hope will serve as a methodological template for conservation planners. We make recommendations on modelling methods that are appropriate when presence‐absence and presence‐only survey data are available and provide methodological details and a website with data and training material for modellers. Our aim is to provide practical guidelines that preserve methodological rigour and result in defendable habitat models and maps. The case study was undertaken in a rapidly developing area with substantial biodiversity values under urbanization pressure. Habitat maps for seven priority fauna species were developed using logistic regression models of species‐habitat relationships and a bootstrapping methodology was used to evaluate model predictions. The modelled species were the koala, tiger quoll, squirrel glider, yellow‐bellied glider, masked owl, powerful owl and sooty owl. Models ranked sites adequately in terms of habitat suitability and provided predictions of sufficient reliability for the purpose of identifying preliminary conservation priority areas. However, they are subject to multiple uncertainties and should not be viewed as a completely accurate representation of the distribution of species habitat. We recommend the use of model prediction in an adaptive framework whereby models are iteratively updated and refined as new data become available.     

Place prioritization for biodiversity conservation using probabilistic surrogate distribution data

We analyse optimal and heuristic place prioritization algorithms for biodiversity conservation area network design which can use probabilistic data on the distribution of surrogates for biodiversity. We show how an Expected Surrogate Set Covering Problem (ESSCP) and a Maximal Expected Surrogate Covering Problem (MESCP) can be linearized for computationally efficient solution. For the ESSCP, we study the performance of two optimization software packages (XPRESS and CPLEX) and five heuristic algorithms based on traditional measures of complementarity and rarity as well as the Shannon and Simpson indices of α‐diversity which are being used in this context for the first time. On small artificial data sets the optimal place prioritization algorithms often produced more economical solutions than the heuristic algorithms, though not always ones guaranteed to be optimal. However, with large data sets, the optimal algorithms often required long computation times and produced no better results than heuristic ones. Thus there is generally little reason to prefer optimal to heuristic algorithms with probabilistic data sets.     

The ED strategy: how species-level surrogates indicate general biodiversity patterns through an 'environmental diversity' perspective

Biodiversity assessment requires that we use surrogate information in practice to indicate more general biodiversity patterns. ‘ED’ refers to a surrogates framework that can link species data and environmental information based on a robust relationship of compositional dissimilarities to ordinations that indicate underlying environmental variation. In an example analysis of species and environmental data from Panama, the environmental and spatial variables that correlate with an hybrid multi‐dimensional scaling ordination were able to explain 83% of the variation in the corresponding Bray Curtis dissimilarities. The assumptions of ED also provide the rationale for its use of p‐median optimization criteria to measure biodiversity patterns among sites in a region. M.B. Araújo, P.J. Densham & P.H. Williams (2004, Journal of Biogeography 31 , 1) have re‐named ED as ‘AD’ in their evaluation of the surrogacy value of ED based on European species data. Because lessons from previous work on ED options consequently may have been neglected, we use a corroboration framework to investigate the evidence and ‘background knowledge’ presented in their evaluations of ED. Investigations focus on the possibility that their weak corroboration of ED surrogacy (non‐significance of target species recovery relative to a null model) may be a consequence of Araújo et al.'s use of particular evidence and randomizations. We illustrate how their use of discrete ED, and not the recommended continuous ED, may have produced unnecessarily poor species recovery values. Further, possible poor optimization of their MDS ordinations, due to small numbers of simulations and/or low resolution of stress values appears to have provided a possible poor basis for ED application and, consequently, may have unnecessarily favoured non‐corroboration results. Consideration of Araújo et al.'s randomizations suggests that acknowledged sampling biases in the European data have not only artefactually promoted the non‐significance of ED recovery values, but also artefactually elevated the significance of competing species surrogates recovery values. We conclude that little credence should be given to the comparisons of ED and species‐based complementarity sets presented in M.B. Araújo, P.J. Densham & P.H. Williams (2004, Journal of Biogeography 31 , 1), unless the factors outlined here can be analysed for their effects on results. We discuss the lessons concerning surrogates evaluation emerging from our investigations, calling for better provision in such studies of the background information that can allow (i) critical examination of evidence (both at the initial corroboration and re‐evaluation stages), and (ii) greater synthesis of lessons about the pitfalls of different forms of evidence in different contexts.     

Representing species in reserves from patterns of assemblage diversity

Aim A positive relationship between assemblage diversity (AD) – equivalent to the biotic version of the environment diversity, ED, method – and species diversity has been reported. This being true, reserve networks with many different assemblages would be expected to represent more species than reserve networks including fewer and less different assemblages. This idea was tested using European species atlas distributions of terrestrial vertebrates and plants. It is asked whether: (1) maximizing AD within one group would represent species diversity of this group better than expected by chance; and (2) maximizing AD within one group would represent species diversity of other groups better than expected by chance. Location Europe. Methods Three ordination techniques (non‐metric multidimensional scaling, detrended correspondence analysis and correspondence analysis) are used to summarize patterns of compositional turnover within assemblages. p‐Median location‐allocation models are then calculated from ordination space to measure the degree of expected species representation within the group being sampled as well as the expected representation within other groups. Results are compared with near‐optimal solutions obtained with complementarity‐based algorithms and to a null model obtained by simulating selection of areas at random. Matrix correlation analysis was also performed to investigate broad patterns of covariation in compositional turnover of assemblages of species belonging to different taxonomic groups and these values were compared with correlation in species richness scores between groups. Results The AD model did not always represent more species of the group being sampled than expected by chance (P < 0.05). Results were independent of the method and taxonomic group considered. Effectiveness of AD within one group to represent species of other groups varied, but in most cases it was worse than using complementarity‐based algorithms as a surrogate strategy. Even when correlations indicated high coincidence between assemblages, taxonomic‐based surrogates did not always recover more species than expected by chance (P < 0.05). Main conclusions Results are discussed in the light of two possible explanations: (1) the AD model is based on unrealistic assumptions, namely that species have equal probability of having the centre of their distributions anywhere in ordination space and that species display unimodal, symmetrical, bell‐shaped response curves to gradients; (2) particular implementation of methods may be inadequate to summarize useful complementarity among assemblages, especially for restricted‐range species. We conclude that both arguments are likely to play a role in explaining results, but that opportunities exist to improve performance of existing surrogate strategies.     

系统保护规划和不可代替性分析在区域规划中的应用

在区域规划中应该把保护和发展密切结合起来,才能为实施可持续发展战略奠定基础。遵循系统保护规划和不可代替性分析的观点,内蒙古克 什克腾旗应该建立10个不同类型的保护区,并与有关部门和社区实施共同管理,建设成为一个可持续发展的示范基地。     

加拿大自然保护区规划的启迪

为了更好地国际接轨,搞好自然保护区的管理工作,我们需要学习其他国家的先进经验,本文重点介绍加拿大自然保护区规划方面的典型经验,包括系统规划,综合管理规划,资源管理规划,服务规划,行动规划,以及各种规划之间的关系,并提出了对我们的启迪与可借鉴之处。