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Factoring economic costs into conservation planning may not improve agreement over priorities for protection.


ABSTRACT: Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods. We combine a simulation approach with a case study of forests in the eastern United States, paying particular attention to how covariation between ecological benefits and economic costs influences agreement levels. For many conservation goals, agreement over spatial priorities improves with ROI methods. However, we also show that a reliance on ROI-based prioritization can sometimes exacerbate disagreements over priorities. As such, accounting for costs in conservation planning does not enable society to sidestep careful consideration of the ecological goals of conservation.

SUBMITTER: Armsworth PR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5740120 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Factoring economic costs into conservation planning may not improve agreement over priorities for protection.

Armsworth Paul R PR   Jackson Heather B HB   Cho Seong-Hoon SH   Clark Melissa M   Fargione Joseph E JE   Iacona Gwenllian D GD   Kim Taeyoung T   Larson Eric R ER   Minney Thomas T   Sutton Nathan A NA  

Nature communications 20171221 1


Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI)  ...[more]

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