Beyond opportunism: Key principles for systematic reserve selection

Pressey, Robert L.; Humphries, C. J.; Margules, C. R.; Vane‐Wright, R. I.; Williams, Paul H.

doi:10.1016/0169-5347(93)90023-i

Cited by 921 publications

(670 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Complementary networks (Pressey et al 1993;Margules and Pressey 2000) were identified to address the following management goals: (i) representation of all native bird species, preferably in grid cells with large local population sizes (species diversity, SD), (ii) representation of environmental diversity (ED), and (iii) representation of all native habitats (HD). In addition, for comparison with realworld applications, we evaluated the performance of (iv) the existing reserve network within the study region.…”

Section: Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing biodiversity: selecting priority areas for conservation using different criteria

2005

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Abstract. International treaties call for the protection of biodiversity in all its manifestations, including ecosystem and species diversities. The selection of most priority area networks focuses, however, primarily on species richness and occurrence. The effectiveness of this approach in capturing higher order manifestations of biodiversity, that is ecosystem and environmental diversity patterns, remains poorly understood. Using a case study of birds and environmental data from South Africa and Lesotho, we test how complementary networks that maximise species diversity perform with regard to their representation of ecosystem and environmental diversity, and vice versa. We compare these results to the performance of the existing reserve network. We conclude that focusing on any single biodiversity component alone is insufficient to protect other components. We offer explanations for this in terms of the autocorrelation of species diversity in environmental space.

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Section: Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing biodiversity: selecting priority areas for conservation using different criteria

2005

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“…Optimally balancing financial and ecological constraints to select sets of land parcels to acquire, preserve and rehabilitate is a complex problem. In reaction to this, there has been exponential growth in the literature on systematic reserve selection, design and optimization methods since the field first developed in the early 80s (Kirkpatrick, 1983;Pressey et al, 1993;Margules and Pressey, 2000;Sarkar et al, 2006). These techniques (from here on referred to as "conservation planning methods")havebeenused todesign and maintain reserve systems in ecosystems around the world and have a significant role to play as constraints on undertaking conservation actions become more complex (Margules and Pressey, 2000;Pierce et al, 2005;Oetting et al, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When do conservation planning methods deliver? Quantifying the consequences of uncertainty

Langford

Gordon

Bastin

2009

Ecological Informatics

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The rapid global loss of biodiversity has led to a proliferation of systematic conservation planning methods. In spite of their utility and mathematical sophistication, these methods only provide approximate solutions to real-world problems where there is uncertainty and temporal change. The consequences of errors in these solutions are seldom characterized or addressed. We propose a conceptual structure for exploring the consequences of input uncertainty and oversimplified approximations to real-world processes for any conservation planning tool or strategy. We then present a computational framework based on this structure to quantitatively model species representation and persistence outcomes across a range of uncertainties. These include factors such as land costs, landscape structure, species composition and distribution, and temporal changes in habitat. We demonstrate the utility of the framework using several reserve selection methods including simple rules of thumb and more sophisticated tools such as Marxan and Zonation. We present new results showing how outcomes can be strongly affected by variation in problem characteristics that are seldom compared across multiple studies. These characteristics include number of species prioritized, distribution of species richness and rarity, and uncertainties in the amount and quality of habitat patches. We also demonstrate how the framework allows comparisons between conservation planning strategies and their response to error under a range of conditions. Using the approach presented here will improve conservation outcomes and resource allocation by making it easier to predict and quantify the consequences of many different uncertainties and assumptions simultaneously. Our results show that without more rigorously generalizable results, it is very difficult to predict the amount of error in any conservation plan. These results imply the need for standard practice to include evaluating the effects of multiple real-world complications on the behavior of any conservation planning method.

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“…Starting in the early 1980's, a fairly substantial literature in conservation biology has addressed the "reserve site selection problem" (see, for example, Kirkpatrick (1983), Margules et al (1988), Pressey et al (1993)). A simple formulation of the reserve site selection problem is to choose sites to include in a reserve network in order to conserve the greatest number of species possible given a budget constraint.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%