Securing nonflagship species from extinction

Identifying the characteristics of conservation areas that appeal to potential flagship campaign donors

The conservation flagship approach is a valuable tool for raising funds and awareness, but species-based campaigns have been criticized for providing little benefit to wider biodiversity. One possible solution is to use conservation areas as flagships, but we lack data on the types of area that most appeal to potential donors. Here, we used an online choice experiment involving hypothetical overseas conservation areas to investigate how respondents value a series of conservation area attributes. We calculated the average willingness to pay for each attribute and assessed preference heterogeneity. Our results suggest that community ownership is valued the most, followed by the presence of threatened bird species, low current funding in the conservation area, the presence of charismatic mammals, and charity ownership. Respondents could be divided into three groups, based on their education, environmental organization membership and income. The group of respondents who were less wealthy and were members of environmental organizations were not willing to pay for this kind of conservation action, suggesting that flagship area campaigns targeted at them should encourage other types of involvement. The other two groups, which included respondents who were less engaged in conservation (neither group included environmental organization members, with one group less wealthy and less educated, and the other wealthier), found community ownership particularly appealing, suggesting that many potential donors may be driven by social concerns. This is a key finding and suggests flagship conservation areas could attract a new audience of donors, helping to support current global efforts to increase the management effectiveness, connectivity and extent of protected areas and land under other effective area-based conservation measures.

Conservation prioritization can resolve the flagship species conundrum

Conservation strategies based on charismatic flagship species, such as tigers, lions, and elephants, successfully attract funding from individuals and corporate donors. However, critics of this species-focused approach argue it wastes resources and often does not benefit broader biodiversity. If true, then the best way of raising conservation funds excludes the best way of spending it. Here we show that this conundrum can be resolved, and that the flagship species approach does not impede cost-effective conservation. Through a tailored prioritization approach, we identify places containing flagship species while also maximizing global biodiversity representation (based on 19,616 terrestrial and freshwater species). We then compare these results to scenarios that only maximized biodiversity representation, and demonstrate that our flagship-based approach achieves 79-89% of our objective. This provides strong evidence that prudently selected flagships can both raise funds for conservation and help target where these resources are best spent to conserve biodiversity.

Extinct flagships: linking extinct and threatened species

Despite much effort to promote the conservation and recovery of threatened species, the extent of the current list of threatened vertebrates (> 7,600 species) underscores the need to develop novel communication and marketing tools to raise awareness and funding for their conservation. Although flagship species have been widely used in conservation marketing, the flagship role of extinct species has been largely overlooked and the status of lost species is rarely associated with the status of extant species facing a high risk of extinction. Some extinct species (e.g. the dodo Raphus cucullatus and the thylacine Thylacinus cynocephalus) are cultural and commercial icons and therefore familiar, and may appeal to the public as conservation flagships. We propose a wider use of extinct flagships to raise awareness for the conservation of threatened species by making a direct link between already extinct species and extant species at risk of extinction. We present examples of publicly recognized and iconic extinct species that could be used in marketing for the conservation of threatened species. These extinct species are familiar and may be readily linked to threatened species or species groups. We outline a roadmap for testing their appeal under the extinct flagship concept, through market research. If research identifies that a cognitive link is made between the fate of an extinct species (i.e. they went extinct from human causes) and what may happen to threatened species (i.e. they are at risk of extinction from human causes), extinct species may well have a wider role to play as conservation flagships.

Biodiversity gains from efficient use of private sponsorship for flagship species conservation

To address the global extinction crisis, both efficient use of existing conservation funding and new sources of funding are vital. Private sponsorship of charismatic 'flagship' species conservation represents an important source of new funding, but has been criticized as being inefficient. However, the ancillary benefits of privately sponsored flagship species conservation via actions benefiting other species have not been quantified, nor have the benefits of incorporating such sponsorship into objective prioritization protocols. Here, we use a comprehensive dataset of conservation actions for the 700 most threatened species in New Zealand to examine the potential biodiversity gains from national private flagship species sponsorship programmes. We find that private funding for flagship species can clearly result in additional species and phylogenetic diversity conserved, via conservation actions shared with other species. When private flagship species funding is incorporated into a prioritization protocol to preferentially sponsor shared actions, expected gains can be more than doubled. However, these gains are consistently smaller than expected gains in a hypothetical scenario where private funding could be optimally allocated among all threatened species. We recommend integrating private sponsorship of flagship species into objective prioritization protocols to sponsor efficient actions that maximize biodiversity gains, or wherever possible, encouraging private donations for broader biodiversity goals.

Trends and biases in the listing and recovery planning for threatened species: an Australian case study

Many countries rely on formal legislation to protect and plan for the recovery of threatened species. Even though the listing procedures in threatened species legislation are designed to be consistent for all species there is usually a bias in implementing the laws towards charismatic fauna and flora, which leads to uneven allocation of conservation efforts. However, the extent of bias in national threatened species lists is often unknown. Australia is a good example: the list of threatened species under the Environmental Protection and Biological Conservation Act has not been reviewed since 2000, when it was first introduced. We assessed how well this Act represents threatened species across taxonomic groups and threat status, and whether biases exist in the types of species with recovery plans. We found that birds, amphibians and mammals have high levels of threatened species (12–24%) but < 6% of all reptiles and plants and < 0.01% of invertebrates and fish are considered threatened. Similar taxonomic biases are present in the types of species with recovery plans. Although there have been recent improvements in the representation of threatened species with recovery plans across taxonomic groups, there are still major gaps between the predicted and listed numbers of threatened species. Because of biases in the listing and recovery planning processes many threatened species may receive little attention regardless of their potential for recovery: a lost opportunity to achieve the greatest conservation impact possible. The Environmental Protection and Biological Conservation Act in Australia needs reform to rectify these biases.