Designing systematic conservation assessments that promote effective implementation: best practice from South Africa

Linking knowledge to action in collaborative conservation

Authors have documented a "research-implementation gap" in conservation. Research intended to inform conservation practice often does not, and practice often is not informed by the best science. We used the literature on policy learning (i.e., literature attributing policy change to learning) to structure a study of how practice is informed by science in collaborative conservation. We studied implementation by U.S. states of state wildlife action plans. On the basis of 60 interviews with government and nongovernmental organization representatives, we identified 144 implementation initiatives for State Wildlife Action Plans that were collaborative. We conducted case studies of 6 of these initiatives, which included interviews of key individuals and analysis of written documents. We coded interview transcripts and written documents to identify factors that influence availability and use of scientific information. We integrated these factors into a model of collaborative conservation. Although tangible factors such as funding and labor directly affected the availability of scientific information, practitioners' ability and willingness to use the information depended on less tangible factors such as the quality of interpersonal relationships and dialogue. Our work demonstrates empirically that relationships and dialogue led to: (1) the sharing of resources, such as funding and labor, that were needed to carry out research and produce information and (2) agreement among researchers and practitioners on conservation objectives, which was necessary for that new information to inform action. Our findings can be understood in the context of broader concepts articulated in the policy-learning literature, which establishes that social learning (improving relationships and dialogue) provides the foundation for conceptual learning (setting objectives) and technical learning (determining how to achieve these objectives).

Toward best practices for developing regional connectivity maps

To conserve ecological connectivity (the ability to support animal movement, gene flow, range shifts, and other ecological and evolutionary processes that require large areas), conservation professionals need coarse-grained maps to serve as decision-support tools or vision statements and fine-grained maps to prescribe site-specific interventions. To date, research has focused primarily on fine-grained maps (linkage designs) covering small areas. In contrast, we devised 7 steps to coarsely map dozens to hundreds of linkages over a large area, such as a nation, province, or ecoregion. We provide recommendations on how to perform each step on the basis of our experiences with 6 projects: California Missing Linkages (2001), Arizona Wildlife Linkage Assessment (2006), California Essential Habitat Connectivity (2010), Two Countries, One Forest (northeastern United States and southeastern Canada) (2010), Washington State Connected Landscapes (2010), and the Bhutan Biological Corridor Complex (2010). The 2 most difficult steps are mapping natural landscape blocks (areas whose conservation value derives from the species and ecological processes within them) and determining which pairs of blocks can feasibly be connected in a way that promotes conservation. Decision rules for mapping natural landscape blocks and determining which pairs of blocks to connect must reflect not only technical criteria, but also the values and priorities of stakeholders. We recommend blocks be mapped on the basis of a combination of naturalness, protection status, linear barriers, and habitat quality for selected species. We describe manual and automated procedures to identify currently functioning or restorable linkages. Once pairs of blocks have been identified, linkage polygons can be mapped by least-cost modeling, other approaches from graph theory, or individual-based movement models. The approaches we outline make assumptions explicit, have outputs that can be improved as underlying data are improved, and help implementers focus strictly on ecological connectivity.

Raising the bar for systematic conservation planning

Systematic conservation planning (SCP) represents a significant step toward cost-effective, transparent allocation of resources for biodiversity conservation. However, research demonstrates important consequences of uncertainties in SCP and of basing methods on simplified circumstances involving few real-world complexities. Current research often relies on single case studies with unknown forms and amounts of uncertainty as well as low statistical power for generalizing results. Consequently, conservation managers have little evidence for the true performance of conservation planning methods in their own complex, uncertain applications. To build effective and reliable methods in SCP, there is a need for more challenging and integrated testing of their robustness to uncertainty and complexity, and much greater emphasis on generalization to real-world situations.

The potential for voluntary instruments to achieve conservation planning goals: the case of conservancies in South Africa

Spatial prioritizations and gap analyses are increasingly undertaken to allocate conservation resources. Most spatial prioritizations are conducted without specifying the conservation instruments to be implemented and gap analyses typically assess formally protected areas but increasingly include private land conservation instruments. We examine conservancies to see if these voluntary instruments contribute towards achieving goals of South African conservation planning initiatives. We conducted a nationwide survey and interviews with conservancy members in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape. Conservancies have potential for assisting South Africa to achieve conservation planning goals at national and local scales but their inclusion in spatial prioritizations and gap analyses predicates improved protection for nature, operational refinement and increased support. We sound a warning to conservation planning initiatives that incorporate voluntary instruments on private land, and present recommendations for strengthening such instruments to make them more effective. Our findings may assist conservation planners elsewhere to design more effective conservation planning initiatives focused on private land.

Comparing spatially explicit ecological and social values for natural areas to identify effective conservation strategies

Consideration of the social values people assign to relatively undisturbed native ecosystems is critical for the success of science-based conservation plans. We used an interview process to identify and map social values assigned to 31 ecosystem services provided by natural areas in an agricultural landscape in southern Australia. We then modeled the spatial distribution of 12 components of ecological value commonly used in setting spatial conservation priorities. We used the analytical hierarchy process to weight these components and used multiattribute utility theory to combine them into a single spatial layer of ecological value. Social values assigned to natural areas were negatively correlated with ecological values overall, but were positively correlated with some components of ecological value. In terms of the spatial distribution of values, people valued protected areas, whereas those natural areas underrepresented in the reserve system were of higher ecological value. The habitats of threatened animal species were assigned both high ecological value and high social value. Only small areas were assigned both high ecological value and high social value in the study area, whereas large areas of high ecological value were of low social value, and vice versa. We used the assigned ecological and social values to identify different conservation strategies (e.g., information sharing, community engagement, incentive payments) that may be effective for specific areas. We suggest that consideration of both ecological and social values in selection of conservation strategies can enhance the success of science-based conservation planning.

Conservation planning when costs are uncertain

Spatially explicit information on the financial costs of conservation actions can improve the ability of conservation planning to achieve ecological and economic objectives, but the magnitude of this improvement may depend on the accuracy of the cost estimates. Data on costs of conservation actions are inherently uncertain. For example, the cost of purchasing a property for addition to a protected-area network depends on the individual landholder's preferences, values, and aspirations, all of which vary in space and time, and the effect of this uncertainty on the conservation priority of a site is relatively untested. We investigated the sensitivity of the conservation priority of sites to uncertainty in cost estimates. We explored scenarios for expanding (four-fold) the protected-area network in Queensland, Australia to represent a range of vegetation types, species, and abiotic environments, while minimizing the cost of purchasing new properties. We estimated property costs for 17, 790 10 × 10 km sites with data on unimproved land values. We systematically changed property costs and noted how these changes affected conservation priority of a site. The sensitivity of the priority of a site to changes in cost data was largely dependent on a site's importance for meeting conservation targets. Sites that were essential or unimportant for meeting targets maintained high or low priorities, respectively, regardless of cost estimates. Sites of intermediate conservation priority were sensitive to property costs and represented the best option for efficiency gains, especially if they could be purchased at a lower price than anticipated. Thus, uncertainty in cost estimates did not impede the use of cost data in conservation planning, and information on the sensitivity of the conservation priority of a site to estimates of the price of land can be used to inform strategic conservation planning before the actual price of the land is known.

Evaluating private land conservation in the Cape Lowlands, South Africa

Evaluation is important for judiciously allocating limited conservation resources and for improving conservation success through learning and strategy adjustment. We evaluated the application of systematic conservation planning goals and conservation gains from incentive-based stewardship interventions on private land in the Cape Lowlands and Cape Floristic Region, South Africa. We collected spatial and nonspatial data (2003-2007) to determine the number of hectares of vegetation protected through voluntary contractual and legally nonbinding (informal) agreements with landowners; resources spent on these interventions; contribution of the agreements to 5- and 20-year conservation goals for representation and persistence in the Cape Lowlands of species and ecosystems; and time and staff required to meet these goals. Conservation gains on private lands across the Cape Floristic Region were relatively high. In 5 years, 22,078 ha (27,800 ha of land) and 46,526 ha (90,000 ha of land) of native vegetation were protected through contracts and informal agreements, respectively. Informal agreements often were opportunity driven and cheaper and faster to execute than contracts. All contractual agreements in the Cape Lowlands were within areas of high conservation priority (identified through systematic conservation planning), which demonstrated the conservation plan's practical application and a high level of overlap between resource investment (approximately R1.14 million/year in the lowlands) and priority conservation areas. Nevertheless, conservation agreements met only 11% of 5-year and 9% of 20-year conservation goals for Cape Lowlands and have made only a moderate contribution to regional persistence of flora to date. Meeting the plan's conservation goals will take three to five times longer and many more staff members to maintain agreements than initially envisaged.

Mapping human and social dimensions of conservation opportunity for the scheduling of conservation action on private land

Abstract  Spatial prioritization techniques are applied in conservation-planning initiatives to allocate conservation resources. Although typically they are based on ecological data (e.g., species, habitats, ecological processes), increasingly they also include nonecological data, mostly on the vulnerability of valued features and economic costs of implementation. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of conservation actions implemented through conservation-planning initiatives is a function of the human and social dimensions of social-ecological systems, such as stakeholders' willingness and capacity to participate. We assessed human and social factors hypothesized to define opportunities for implementing effective conservation action by individual land managers (those responsible for making day-to-day decisions on land use) and mapped these to schedule implementation of a private land conservation program. We surveyed 48 land managers who owned 301 land parcels in the Makana Municipality of the Eastern Cape province in South Africa. Psychometric statistical and cluster analyses were applied to the interview data so as to map human and social factors of conservation opportunity across a landscape of regional conservation importance. Four groups of landowners were identified, in rank order, for a phased implementation process. Furthermore, using psychometric statistical techniques, we reduced the number of interview questions from 165 to 45, which is a preliminary step toward developing surrogates for human and social factors that can be developed rapidly and complemented with measures of conservation value, vulnerability, and economic cost to more-effectively schedule conservation actions. This work provides conservation and land management professionals direction on where and how implementation of local-scale conservation should be undertaken to ensure it is feasible.

Conservation planning as a transdisciplinary process

Despite substantial growth in the field of conservation planning, the speed and success with which conservation plans are converted into conservation action remains limited. This gap between science and action extends beyond conservation planning into many other applied sciences and has been linked to complexity of current societal problems, compartmentalization of knowledge and management sectors, and limited collaboration between scientists and decision makers. Transdisciplinary approaches have been proposed as a possible way to address these challenges and to bridge the gap between science and action. These approaches move beyond the bridging of disciplines to an approach in which science becomes a social process resolving problems through the participation and mutual learning of stakeholders. We explored the principles of transdisciplinarity, in light of our experiences as conservation-planning researchers working in South Africa, to better understand what is required to make conservation planning transdisciplinary and therefore more effective. Using the transdisciplinary hierarchy of knowledge (empirical, pragmatic, normative, and purposive), we found that conservation planning has succeeded in integrating many empirical disciplines into the pragmatic stakeholder-engaged process of strategy development and implementation. Nevertheless, challenges remain in engagement of the social sciences and in understanding the social context of implementation. Farther up this knowledge hierarchy, at the normative and purposive levels, we found that a lack of integrated land-use planning and policies (normative) and the dominant effect of national values (purposive) that prioritize growth and development limit the effectiveness and relevance of conservation plans. The transdisciplinary hierarchy of knowledge highlighted that we need to move beyond bridging the empirical and pragmatic disciplines into the complex normative world of laws, policies, and planning and become engaged in the purposive processes of decision making, behavior change, and value transfer. Although there are indications of progress in this direction, working at the normative and purposive levels requires time, leadership, resources, skills that are absent in conservation training and practice, and new forms of recognition in systems of scientific reward and funding.

Use of land facets to plan for climate change: conserving the arenas, not the actors

Even under the most optimistic scenarios, during the next century human-caused climate change will threaten many wild populations and species. The most useful conservation response is to enlarge and link protected areas to support range shifts by plants and animals. To prioritize land for reserves and linkages, some scientists attempt to chain together four highly uncertain models (emission scenarios, global air-ocean circulation, regional circulation, and biotic response). This approach has high risk of error propagation and compounding and produces outputs at a coarser scale than conservation decisions. Instead, we advocate identifying land facets-recurring landscape units with uniform topographic and soil attributes-and designing reserves and linkages for diversity and interspersion of these units. This coarse-filter approach would conserve the arenas of biological activity, rather than the temporary occupants of those arenas. Integrative, context-sensitive variables, such as insolation and topographic wetness, are useful for defining land facets. Classification procedures such as k-means or fuzzy clustering are a good way to define land facets because they can analyze millions of pixels and are insensitive to case order. In regions lacking useful soil maps, river systems or riparian plants can indicate important facets. Conservation planners should set higher representation targets for rare and distinctive facets. High interspersion of land facets can promote ecological processes, evolutionary interaction, and range shift. Relevant studies suggest land-facet diversity is a good surrogate for today's biodiversity, but fails to conserve some species. To minimize such failures, a reserve design based on land facets should complement, rather than replace, other approaches. Designs based on land facets are not biased toward data-rich areas and can be applied where no maps of land cover exist.

Comparing and integrating community-based and science-based approaches to prioritizing marine areas for protection

We compared and integrated marine protected areas proposed through community and scientific assessments in 2 regions of British Columbia, Canada. The community priorities were identified during individual and group interviews with knowledgeable resource users. The scientific priorities were developed with abiotic and biotic data in Marxan, a decision-support tool. The resulting maps of community-based and science-based priorities were very similar for the inshore areas, which lent credibility to both approaches. The resource users thought the science-based maps were fairly good at highlighting areas important for conservation, but preferred the scenarios that integrated the 2 maps to either constituent map. Incorporating spatial variation in human impacts on the marine areas and commercial fishing, which are both costs of protection, into our Marxan analyses led to scenarios that were different from either constituent map. Our results show the value of integrating community-based and science-based approaches in conservation planning to achieve community acceptance and conservation utility. They also reveal that people's assessments on the basis of their traditional ecological knowledge may serve as a reasonable proxy for scientific approaches in selecting areas of ecological value.

Leadership: a new frontier in conservation science

Leadership is a critical tool for expanding the influence of conservation science, but recent advances in leadership concepts and practice remain underutilized by conservation scientists. Furthermore, an explicit conceptual foundation and definition of leadership in conservation science are not available in the literature. Here we drew on our diverse leadership experiences, our reading of leadership literature, and discussions with selected conservation science leaders to define conservation-science leadership, summarize an exploratory set of leadership principles that are applicable to conservation science, and recommend actions to expand leadership capacity among conservation scientists and practitioners. We define 2 types of conservation-science leadership: shaping conservation science through path-breaking research, and advancing the integration of conservation science into policy, management, and society at large. We focused on the second, integrative type of leadership because we believe it presents the greatest opportunity for improving conservation effectiveness. We identified 8 leadership principles derived mainly from the "adaptive leadership" literature: recognize the social dimension of the problem; cycle frequently through action and reflection; get and maintain attention; combine strengths of multiple leaders; extend your reach through networks of relationships; strategically time your effort; nurture productive conflict; and cultivate diversity. Conservation scientists and practitioners should strive to develop themselves as leaders, and the Society for Conservation Biology, conservation organizations, and academia should support this effort through professional development, mentoring, teaching, and research.

Mapping grazing-induced degradation in a semi-arid environment: a rapid and cost effective approach for assessment and monitoring

Improved techniques for measuring and monitoring the state of biodiversity are required for reporting on national obligations to international and regional conservation institutions. Measuring the extent of grazing-related degradation in semi-arid ecosystems has proved difficult. Here we present an accurate and cost-effective method for doing this, and apply it in a South African semi-arid region that forms part of a globally significant biodiversity hotspot. We grouped structurally and functionally similar vegetation units, which were expert-mapped at the 1:50,000 scale, into four habitat types, and developed habitat-specific degradation models. We quantified degradation into three categories, using differences between dry and wet season values of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the three succulent karoo habitats, and the difference between maximum and mean NDVI values for the subtropical thicket habitat. Field evaluation revealed an accuracy of 86%. Overall, degradation was high: 24% of the study area was modeled as severely degraded, and only 9% as intact. Levels of degradation were highest for bottomland habitats that were most exposed to grazing impacts. In sharp contrast to our methods, a widely used, broad-scale and snapshot assessment of land cover in South Africa was only 33% accurate, and it considerably underestimated the extent of severely degraded habitat in the study area. While our approach requires a multidisciplinary team, and in particular expert knowledge on the characteristics and spatial delimitation of vegetation types, it is repeatable, rapid, and relatively inexpensive. Consequently, it holds great promise for monitoring and evaluation programs in semi-arid ecosystems, in Africa, and beyond.

Protected areas in Europe: principle and practice

Systematic conservation planning provides a structured, target-driven approach to ensuring the long-term maintenance of biodiversity. However, reviews of how well the steps of such a planning process are applied in different regions are scant; some steps may be implemented although there is no formal systematic conservation planning process taking place. Here we conduct such a review for Europe. Taking in turn the six recognized steps of systematic conservation planning, for this region: (i) The availability of data on biodiversity remains a significant constraint on conservation planning because, although species occurrences have often been better mapped in Europe than elsewhere, there is a continuing mismatch between the spatial resolution at which data coverage is adequate and that of habitat fragmentation. (ii) Although there are important legal frameworks for conservation planning, explicit quantitative goals for the representation and persistence of biodiversity are largely lacking. (iii) Assessment of the effectiveness of existing protected area systems is patchy and rather ill developed, with a substantial gulf between the work being conducted in more academic and policy-oriented arenas. (iv) Nonetheless, particularly through the Natura 2000 process, there has been an extraordinary program to select additional protected areas. (v) Although it has taken longer than originally envisaged, this program is resulting in a substantial expansion of the protected area system. (vi) There are significant concerns over the extent to which existing protected area systems can maintain their biodiversity values, particularly given the small size of many of these areas and likely impacts of climate change.

An operational model for mainstreaming ecosystem services for implementation

Research on ecosystem services has grown markedly in recent years. However, few studies are embedded in a social process designed to ensure effective management of ecosystem services. Most research has focused only on biophysical and valuation assessments of putative services. As a mission-oriented discipline, ecosystem service research should be user-inspired and user-useful, which will require that researchers respond to stakeholder needs from the outset and collaborate with them in strategy development and implementation. Here we provide a pragmatic operational model for achieving the safeguarding of ecosystem services. The model comprises three phases: assessment, planning, and management. Outcomes of social, biophysical, and valuation assessments are used to identify opportunities and constraints for implementation. The latter then are transformed into user-friendly products to identify, with stakeholders, strategic objectives for implementation (the planning phase). The management phase undertakes and coordinates actions that achieve the protection of ecosystem services and ensure the flow of these services to beneficiaries. This outcome is achieved via mainstreaming, or incorporating the safeguarding of ecosystem services into the policies and practices of sectors that deal with land- and water-use planning. Management needs to be adaptive and should be institutionalized in a suite of learning organizations that are representative of the sectors that are concerned with decision-making and planning. By following the phases of our operational model, projects for safeguarding ecosystem services are likely to empower stakeholders to implement effective on-the-ground management that will achieve resilience of the corresponding social-ecological systems.

Knowing but not doing: selecting priority conservation areas and the research-implementation gap

Conservation assessment is a rapidly evolving discipline whose stated goal is the design of networks of protected areas that represent and ensure the persistence of nature (i.e., species, habitats, and environmental processes) by separating priority areas from the activities that degrade or destroy them. Nevertheless, despite a burgeoning scientific literature that ever refines these techniques for allocating conservation resources, it is widely believed that conservation assessments are rarely translated into actions that actually conserve nature. We reviewed the conservation assessment literature in peer-reviewed journals and conducted survey questionnaires of the authors of these studies. Two-thirds of conservation assessments published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature do not deliver conservation action, primarily because most researchers never plan for implementation. This research-implementation gap between conservation science and real-world action is a genuine phenomenon and is a specific example of the "knowing-doing gap" that is widely recognized in management science. Given the woefully inadequate resources allocated for conservation, our findings raise questions over the utility of conservation assessment science, as currently practiced, to provide useful, pragmatic solutions to conservation planning problems. A reevaluation of the conceptual and operational basis of conservation planning research is urgently required. We recommend the following actions for beginning a process for bridging the research-implementation gap in conservation planning: (1) acknowledge the research-implementation gap is real, (2) source research questions from practitioners, (3) situate research within a broader conservation planning model, (4) expand the social dimension of conservation assessments, (5) support conservation plans with transdisciplinary social learning institutions, (6) reward academics for societal engagement and implementation, and (7) train students in skills for "doing" conservation.

Species prioritization for monitoring and management in regional multiple species conservation plans

Successful conservation plans are not solely achieved by acquiring optimally designed reserves. Ongoing monitoring and management of the biodiversity in those reserves is an equally important, but often neglected or poorly executed, part of the conservation process. In this paper we address one of the first and most important steps in designing a monitoring program - deciding what to monitor. We present a strategy for prioritizing species for monitoring and management in multispecies conservation plans. We use existing assessments of threatened status, and the degree and spatial and temporal extent of known threats to link the prioritization of species to the overarching goals and objectives of the conservation plan. We consider both broad and localized spatial scales to capture the regional conservation context and the practicalities of local management and monitoring constraints. Spatial scales that are commensurate with available data are selected. We demonstrate the utility of this strategy through application to a set of 85 plants and animals in an established multispecies conservation plan in San Diego County, California, USA. We use the prioritization to identify the most prominent risk factors and the habitats associated with the most threats to species. The protocol highlighted priorities that had not previously been identified and were not necessarily intuitive without systematic application of the criteria; many high-priority species have received no monitoring attention to date, and lower-priority species have. We recommend that in the absence of clear focal species, monitoring threats in highly impacted habitats may be a way to circumvent the need to monitor all the targeted species.

Systematic conservation planning and the cost of tackling conservation conflicts with large carnivores in Italy

Conservation in Europe (including the establishment of protected areas) is undertaken mainly through legislation and on densely populated private land. Consequently, conflicts of interest arise between human economic activities and biodiversity conservation. We used a systematic approach to conservation planning to explore different conservation scenarios for the Apennine populations of wolves (Canis lupus) and bears (Ursus arctos marsicanus) in Italy. The conservation measures we considered were electrified fences and guard dogs to prevent wolves and bears from preying on sheep. We used habitat suitability models of the two species as an estimate of their distributions. Across the study area, we estimated the potential intensity of conflict caused by predation on sheep and the cost of the antipredator measures. We examined scenarios for the conservation of wolves and bears that identified systems of sites where antipredator measures should be applied to either minimize the economic cost of the plan or tackle a predetermined amount of conflict. The overall cost of the conservation plans ranged between euro1,486,000 and euro16,876,000, depending on the scenario and on the size of the conservation target. Because potential conflict intensity (i.e., potential predation) and cost of conflict resolution were correlated, the scenarios that minimized cost also minimized the amount of conflict that was addressed. Conserving these two species by addressing their predation on sheep was up to 4.36 times more expensive than conserving them by providing suitable habitat in areas of low conflict. Yet avoiding conflicts is not always desirable because it can drastically reduce the options for conservation. Choosing a conservation plan requires consideration of the level of threat to the target species and their sensitivity to conflicts.

Conservation planning in a changing world

Conservation planning is the process of locating, configuring, implementing and maintaining areas that are managed to promote the persistence of biodiversity and other natural values. Conservation planning is inherently spatial. The science behind it has solved important spatial problems and increasingly influenced practice. To be effective, however, conservation planning must deal better with two types of change. First, biodiversity is not static in time or space but generated and maintained by natural processes. Second, humans are altering the planet in diverse ways at ever faster rates.