Strategic restoration planning for land birds in the Colorado River Delta, Mexico.

Ecological restoration is an essential strategy for mitigating the current biodiversity crisis, yet restoration actions are costly. We used systematic conservation planning principles to design an approach that prioritizes restoration sites for birds and tested it in a riparian forest restoration program in the Colorado River Delta. Restoration goals were to maximize the abundance and diversity of 15 priority birds with a variety of habitat preferences. We built abundance models for priority birds based on the current landscape, and predicted bird distributions and relative abundances under a scenario of complete riparian forest restoration throughout our study area. Then, we used Zonation conservation planning software to rank this restored landscape based on core areas for all priority birds. The locations with the highest ranks represented the highest priorities for restoration and were located throughout the river reach. We optimized how much of the available landscape to restore by simulating restoration of the top 10-90% of ranked sites in 10% intervals. We found that total diversity was maximized when 40% of the landscape was restored, and mean relative abundance was maximized when 80% of the landscape was restored. The results suggest that complete restoration is not optimal for this community of priority birds and restoration of approximately 60% of the landscape would provide a balance between maximum relative abundance and diversity. Subsequent planning efforts will combine our results with an assessment of restoration costs to provide further decision support for the restoration-siting process. Our approach can be applied to any landscape-scale restoration program to improve the return on investment of limited economic resources for restoration.

Planning protected areas network that are relevant today and under future climate change is possible: the case of Atlantic Forest endemic birds.

BACKGROUND: A key strategy in biodiversity conservation is the establishment of protected areas. In the future, however, the redistribution of species in response to ongoing climate change is likely to affect species' representativeness in those areas. Here we quantify the effectiveness of planning protected areas network to represent 151 birds endemic to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest hotspot, under current and future climate change conditions for 2050. METHODS: We combined environmental niche modeling and systematic conservation planning using both a county and a regional level planning strategy. We recognized the conflict between biodiversity conservation and economic development, including socio-economic targets (as opposed to biological only) and using planning units that are meaningful for policy-makers. RESULTS: We estimated an average contraction of 29,500 km2 in environmentally suitable areas for birds, representing 52% of currently suitable areas. Still, the most cost-effective solution represented almost all target species, requiring only ca. 10% of the Atlantic Forest counties to achieve that representativeness, independent of strategy. More than 50% of these counties were selected both in the current and future planned networks, representing >83% of the species. DISCUSSION: Our results indicate that: (i) planning protected areas network currently can be useful to represent species under climate change; (ii) the overlapped planning units in the best solution for both current and future conditions can be considered as "no regret" areas; (iii) priority counties are spread throughout the biome, providing specific guidance wherever the possibility of creating protected area arises; and (iv) decisions can occur at different administrative spheres (Federal, State or County) as we found quite similar numerical solutions using either county or regional level strategies.

Waiting can be an optimal conservation strategy, even in a crisis discipline.

Biodiversity conservation projects confront immediate and escalating threats with limited funding. Conservation theory suggests that the best response to the species extinction crisis is to spend money as soon as it becomes available, and this is often an explicit constraint placed on funding. We use a general dynamic model of a conservation landscape to show that this decision to "front-load" project spending can be suboptimal if a delay allows managers to use resources more strategically. Our model demonstrates the existence of temporal efficiencies in conservation management, which parallel the spatial efficiencies identified by systematic conservation planning. The optimal timing of decisions balances the rate of biodiversity decline (e.g., the relaxation of extinction debts, or the progress of climate change) against the rate at which spending appreciates in value (e.g., through interest, learning, or capacity building). We contrast the benefits of acting and waiting in two ecosystems where restoration can mitigate forest bird extinction debts: South Australia's Mount Lofty Ranges and Paraguay's Atlantic Forest. In both cases, conservation outcomes cannot be maximized by front-loading spending, and the optimal solution recommends substantial delays before managers undertake conservation actions. Surprisingly, these delays allow superior conservation benefits to be achieved, in less time than front-loading. Our analyses provide an intuitive and mechanistic rationale for strategic delay, which contrasts with the orthodoxy of front-loaded spending for conservation actions. Our results illustrate the conservation efficiencies that could be achieved if decision makers choose when to spend their limited resources, as opposed to just where to spend them.

Restoration planning to guide Aichi targets in a megadiverse country.

Ecological restoration has become an important strategy to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems services. To restore 15% of degraded ecosystems as stipulated by the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi target 15, we developed a prioritization framework to identify potential priority sites for restoration in Mexico, a megadiverse country. We used the most current biological and environmental data on Mexico to assess areas of biological importance and restoration feasibility at national scale and engaged stakeholders and experts throughout the process. We integrated 8 criteria into 2 components (i.e., biological importance and restoration feasibility) in a spatial multicriteria analysis and generated 11 scenarios to test the effect of assigning different component weights. The priority restoration sites were distributed across all terrestrial ecosystems of Mexico; 64.1% were in degraded natural vegetation and 6% were in protected areas. Our results provide a spatial guide to where restoration could enhance the persistence of species of conservation concern and vulnerable ecosystems while maximizing the likelihood of restoration success. Such spatial prioritization is a first step in informing policy makers and restoration planners where to focus local and large-scale restoration efforts, which should additionally incorporate social and monetary cost-benefit considerations.

The efficiency of indicator groups for the conservation of amphibians in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

The adequate selection of indicator groups of biodiversity is an important aspect of the systematic conservation planning. However, these assessments differ in the spatial scales, in the methods used and in the groups considered to accomplish this task, which generally produces contradictory results. The quantification of the spatial congruence between species richness and complementarity among different taxonomic groups is a fundamental step to identify potential indicator groups. Using a constructive approach, the main purposes of this study were to evaluate the performance and efficiency of eight potential indicator groups representing amphibian diversity in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Data on the geographic range of amphibian species that occur in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest were overlapped to the full geographic extent of the biome, which was divided into a regular equal-area grid. Optimization routines based on the concept of complementarily were applied to verify the performance of each indicator group selected in relation to the representativeness of the amphibians in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest as a whole, which were solved by the algorithm "simulated annealing," through the use of the software MARXAN. Some indicator groups were substantially more effective than others in regard to the representation of the taxonomic groups assessed, which was confirmed by the high significance of the data (F = 312.76; P < 0.01). Leiuperidae was considered as the best indicator group among the families analyzed, as it showed a good performance, representing 71% of amphibian species in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (i.e., 290 species), which may be associated with the diffuse geographic distribution of their species. In this sense, this study promotes understanding of how the diversity standards of amphibians can be informative for systematic conservation planning on a regional scale.

Prioridades espaciais para a conservação de mamíferos ameaçados de extinção na região Neotropical / Spatial priorities for the conservation of threatened mammals in the Neotropics

Cerca de um quarto das espécies de mamíferos estão atualmente ameaçadas de extinção, e o constante aumento nessas taxas tem demandado a elaboração de estratégias eficientes, que direcionem esforços para áreas com alto valor de conservação. Mamíferos são extremamente importantes, por desempenharem inúmeros papéis ecológicos cruciais na manutenção dos ecossistemas, de modo que a elaboração de estratégias de conservação para esse grupo é fundamental. Nesse sentido, o presente estudo visou identificar áreas-chave para a conservação de mamíferos ameaçados de extinção na região neotropical, utilizando ecorregiões como unidades geográficas básicas. Ecorregiões neotropicais servem de refúgio para uma grande diversidade de vertebrados, além de abrigar, hoje em dia, inúmeras espécies em extinção. Essas áreas foram selecionadas com base (1) em variáveis ecológicas, evolutivas e outras relacionadas à história de vida de cada uma das 207 espécies de mamíferos neotropicais ameaçados, e (2) também com base no status de conservação, área total e proporção de área protegida e disponível para conservação das 166 ecorregiões neotropicais nas quais tais espécies ocorrem. Foi usado um procedimento de otimização para selecionar o número mínimo de ecorregiões necessárias para representar todas as espécies ao menos uma vez, com base no conceito de complementaridade. As soluções que satisfizeram essa meta de representação foram combinadas em diferentes mapas, nos quais a importância relativa de cada ecorregião foi indicada pela frequência com que ela foi incluída nos conjuntos ótimos. Foi ainda verificado onde é necessário criar reservas que complementem a rede atualmente estabelecida na região neotropical.

Nearly 25% of extant mammal species are currently under threat of extinction. Such a high level of threat of extinction demands the production of effective strategies that direct resources to areas with high conservation value. Mammals are key elements of natural ecosystems as they play key ecological roles in its maintenance. Thus, proposals for effective conservation actions for this group are of paramount importance. Here we aimed to identify key areas for the conservation of Neotropical mammals currently threatened with extinction, using ecoregions as biogeographical planning units. Neotropical ecoregions act as refuge for a diversity of vertebrate species, also harboring a large number of threatened species. We selected key areas for conservation on the basis of (1) ecological and evolutionary variables and others related to the life-history of each of the 207 species of threatened mammals that occur in the Neotropics, and (2) the conservation status, total area and the proportion of available conservation area in 166 Neotropical ecoregions in which these species occur. We used an optimization procedure to select the minimum number of Neotropical ecoregions needed to represent all species at least once, based on the complementarity principle. We combined solutions that satisfied this goal into different maps on which the relative importance of each ecoregion was noted according to the frequency with which it was highlighted as a priority for all solutions. We also checked where it would be necessary to establish additional protected areas to complement the current Neotropical network of protected areas.