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Prioritizing global conservation efforts

Abstract

One of the most pressing issues facing the global conservation community is how to distribute limited resources between regions identified as priorities for biodiversity conservation1,2,3. Approaches such as biodiversity hotspots4, endemic bird areas5 and ecoregions6 are used by international organizations to prioritize conservation efforts globally7. Although identifying priority regions is an important first step in solving this problem, it does not indicate how limited resources should be allocated between regions. Here we formulate how to allocate optimally conservation resources between regions identified as priorities for conservation—the ‘conservation resource allocation problem’. Stochastic dynamic programming is used to find the optimal schedule of resource allocation for small problems but is intractable for large problems owing to the “curse of dimensionality”8. We identify two easy-to-use and easy-to-interpret heuristics that closely approximate the optimal solution. We also show the importance of both correctly formulating the problem and using information on how investment returns change through time. Our conservation resource allocation approach can be applied at any spatial scale. We demonstrate the approach with an example of optimal resource allocation among five priority regions in Wallacea and Sundaland, the transition zone between Asia and Australasia.

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Figure 1: Proportion of endemic species reserved through time in Borneo and Sumatra.
Figure 2: Proportion of the total area of Borneo and Sumatra reserved through time.
Figure 3: Comparison of conservation performance of heuristic algorithms to the optimal solution.
Figure 4: Proportion of five priority regions from Southeast Asia reserved through time.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Elkin, T. Martin and E. Game for comments on the manuscript; and P. Kareiva, S. Polasky, R. L. Pressey, S. Andelman and B. Murdoch for discussions. The work was supported by The University of Queensland and grants from the Australian Research Council (to H.P.P, M. A. McCarthy and R. L. Pressey).

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Correspondence to Kerrie A. Wilson or Hugh P. Possingham.

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Reprints and permissions information is available at npg.nature.com/reprintsandpermissions. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Table

The sources of data for each priority region. (DOC 24 kb)

Supplementary Methods

This file contains the supplementary methods. (PDF 159 kb)

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Wilson, K., McBride, M., Bode, M. et al. Prioritizing global conservation efforts. Nature 440, 337–340 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04366

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