Maximizing conservation benefit for grassland species with contrasting management requirements

Abstract

Summary 1.Conservation management often encompasses multiple, alternative management actions on a given site, involving habitat restoration and maintenance for example. Which actions are preferable depends on the conservation goals, the expected outcomes of actions, and their associated costs. When actions affect habitat quality differently, species that vary in habitat requirements will not respond to the actions in the same way. When all these species are of conservation concern, trade-offs between them are inevitable and the selection of appropriate actions becomes less straightforward. Although this is a common planning problem, it has received little attention in the conservation planning literature. 2. We demonstrate how to obtain cost-effective planning solutions for a set of species with contrasting requirements, when multiple alternative conservation actions are available for each site. We investigate the strength of trade-offs between species with different habitat preferences, when planning optimal management of a set of semi-natural mesic grassland sites. A community of vascular plants and Lepidoptera species depends on such grasslands, which are maintained by cattle grazing. The various species differ in their responses to grazing intensity. We apply an algorithm that selects a grazing intensity for each site to maximize the benefit over all species, under a given budget constraint. 3. The optimal grazing intensity for sites, and consequently, the expected representation of species, was sensitive to the relative values assigned to species (weights) and the budget available. The outcome also depended on assumptions regarding species representation under suboptimal management. A sensitivity analysis showed that the trade-offs between species were strong, illustrating the potentially significant consequences of conservation decisions. Synthesis and applications.Maximizing conservation benefit over all species may result in high representation of some species at the cost of others. Although this is a natural consequence of budget limitations and conservation priorities, understanding these consequences is essential if planning is to accommodate species with different conservation needs. Our methodology is a novel extension of conventional reserve selection methods and can support planning for species with contrasting requirements, leading to more robust and cost-effective conservation decisions.

The Influence of Biodiversity Provision on the Cost Structure of Swedish Dairy Farming

“…(), Moilanen (), and van Teeffelen et al . (). The biological benefit function considers the importance of each species and in I 1 all species are treated as equally important.…”

Paying for conservation: A bioeconomic analysis of the effects of land management options on the viability of an endangered species, Eryngium alpinum

“…Our findings are not only relevant to the design of agri‐environmental schemes but also to other performance‐based payments for conservation, as in the implementation of biodiversity offset requirements by developers (Calvet, Le Coënt, Napoléone, & Quétier, ; Vaissière, Tardieu, Quétier, & Roussel, ). In the absence of long‐term individual‐based demographic data, evaluation of land management has often relied on coarser and sparser indicators like species density or richness (Kleijn et al., , ) or on species distribution models fitted on abundance data (van Teeffelen, Cabeza, Pöyry, Raatikainen, & Kuussaari, ). However, when a single species is the primary target of conservation, detailed demographic studies at small scales can provide valuable information to achieve cost‐effective conservation outcomes.…”

Conservation planning with insects at three different spatial scales

“…Van Teeffelen et al (2008) present an analysis of dissimilar tolerances of species to suboptimal management. The most sensitive species will primarily determine what management is selected, as they obtain very little or no benefit of suboptimal management, while the tolerant species do.…”

“…Nonetheless, even if some species can survive under suboptimal management, one may want to maximize their chances of persistence by considering species‐specific optimal management. Similar in concept to the core‐area approach that retains locations with the highest probabilities, here we based our analysis on management actions that result in the highest abundances separately for each species (see van Teeffelen et al (2008) for a discussion).…”