Title
Use of surrogate species to cost‐effectively prioritize conservation actions
Author(s)
Ward, Michelle;Rhodes, Jonathan R.;Watson, James E. M.;Lefevre, James;Atkinson, Scott;Possingham, Hugh P.
Published
2019
Publisher
Conservation Biology
Published Version DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13430
Abstract
Conservation efforts often focus on umbrella species whose distributions overlap with many other flora and fauna. However, as biodiversity is impacted by different threats that are spatially variable, focusing only on the geographic range overlap of species may not be sufficient in allocating the necessary actions needed to efficiently abate threats. Here, we developed a novel problem‐based method for prioritizing conservation actions for umbrella species, that maximizes the total number of flora and fauna benefiting from management, while considering threats, actions, and costs. We test our new method by assessing the performance of the Australian Federal Government's umbrella prioritization list, which identified 73 umbrella species as priorities for conservation attention. Our results show that the Federal Government priority list benefits only 6% of all Australia's threatened terrestrial species. This could be increased to benefit nearly half (or 46%) of all threatened terrestrial species for the same budget of AUD550m/year if more suitable umbrella species were chosen. This results in a sevenfold increase in management efficiency. We argue that nations around the world can markedly improve the selection of prioritized umbrella species for conservation action by taking advantage of this transparent, quantitative, and objective prioritization approach.
Keywords
conservation planning;conservation shortcuts;cost‐effective analysis;prioritization;surrogacy;threat management;threatened species;umbrella species

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PUB25056