Conserving biodiversity efficiently: What to Do, Where, and When

Wilson, KA and Underwood, EC and Morrison, SA and Klausmeyer, KR and Murdoch, WW and Reyers, B and Wardell-Johnson, G et al. 2007. Conserving biodiversity efficiently: What to Do, Where, and When. PLoS Biology. 5 (9): pp. 1850-1861.

Source Title

PLoS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.0050223

ISSN

15449173

Faculty

School of Agriculture and Environment

Faculty of Science and Engineering

Department of Environmental Biology

Remarks

© 2007 Wilson et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/4804

Collection

Curtin Research Publications

Abstract

Conservation priority-setting schemes have not yet combined geographic priorities with a framework that can guide the allocation of funds among alternate conservation actions that address specific threats. We develop such a framework, and apply it to 17 of the world's 39 Mediterranean ecoregions. This framework offers an improvement over approaches that only focus on land purchase or species richness and do not account for threats. We discover that one could protect many more plant and vertebrate species by investing in a sequence of conservation actions targeted towards specific threats, such as invasive species control, land acquisition, and off-reserve management, than by relying solely on acquiring land for protected areas. Applying this new framework will ensure investment in actions that provide the most cost-effective outcomes for biodiversity conservation. This will help to minimise the misallocation of scarce conservation resources.