avoiding costly conservation mistakes the importance of defining actions and costs in spatial priority setting避免昂贵的保护错误定义的行为的重要性和成本在空间优先级设置.pdf

Avoiding Costly Conservation Mistakes: The Importance of Defining Actions and Costs in Spatial Priority Setting 1,2 1 1 1,3 1 Josie Carwardine *, Kerrie A. Wilson , Matt Watts , Andres Etter , Carissa J. Klein , Hugh P. Possingham1 1The Ecology Centre, School of Integrative Biology, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia, 2 CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Queensland, Australia, ´ 3 Department of Territorial Processes and Human Settlements, Faculty of Environmental and Rural Studies, Javeriana University, Bogota, Colombia Abstract Background: The typical mandate in conservation planning is to identify areas that represent biodiversity targets within the smallest possible area of land or sea, despite the fact that area may be a poor surrogate for the cost of many conservation actions. It is also common for priorities for conservation investment to be identified without regard to the particular conservation action that will be implemented. This demonstrates inadequate problem specification and may lead to inefficiency: the cost of alternative conservation actions can differ throughout a landscape, and may result in dissimilar conservation priorities. Methodology/Principal Findings: We investigate the importance of formulating conservation planning problems with objectives and cost data that relate to specific conservation actions. We identify priority areas in Australia for two alternative conservation actions: land acquisition and stewardship. Our analyses show that using the cost surrogate that most closely reflects the p