Management costs for small protected areas and economies of scale in habitat conservation

Protected area management must be resourced adequately to achieve its conservation objectives. The variability in management costs across candidate sites for protection therefore should inform conservation planning. For example, when considering whether to accept a donation of a property, a conservation organisation must determine whether an adequate endowment is available to fund future management activities. We examine variation in management costs across 78 small protected areas in the UK that are managed by a conservation NGO, the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Management costs exceed acquisition costs when funded on an endowment basis and are not correlated with acquisition costs or with proxy measures for conservation costs commonly relied upon in conservation planning studies. A combination of geographic, ecological and socioeconomic characteristics of sites explains 50% of the variation in management costs. Site area is the most important determinant of management costs, which demonstrate economies of scale; implementing conservation management on an additional hectare adjacent to a larger protected area would incur a lower cost than doing the same adjacent to a smaller site. In evidencing this effect of site area, we avoid problems of spurious correlation that confound previous studies. Protected areas that encompass a greater richness of priority habitats for conservation also require more expensive management. Conservation organisations may have little option but to create small protected areas to conserve biodiversity in highly fragmented landscapes, but the decision to do so should take account of the greater cost burden that small protected areas incur

The threats to Australia\u27s imperilled species and implications for a national conservation response

Since European occupation of Australia, human activities have caused the dramatic decline and sometimes extinction of many of the continent\u27s unique species. Here we provide a comprehensive review of threats to species listed as threatened under Australia\u27s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Following accepted global categories of threat, we find that invasive species affect the largest number of listed species (1257 species, or 82% of all threatened species); ecosystem modifications (e.g. fire) (74% of listed species) and agricultural activity (57%) are also important. The ranking of threats was largely consistent across taxonomic groups and the degree of species\u27 endangerment. These results were significantly different (P < 0.01) from recent analyses of threats to threatened species globally, which highlighted overexploitation, agriculture and urban development as major causes of decline. Australia is distinct not only in the biodiversity it contains but also in the extent and mixture of processes that threaten the survival of these species. Notably, the IUCN threat classification scheme separates the numerous threats (e.g. urban development, agriculture, mining) that cause habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation, hence further research is required to quantify the net impact of these types of habitat change. We provide feasible suggestions for a more coordinated national approach to threatened species conservation, which could provide decision makers and managers at all levels with improved resources and information on threats and management. Adequate policy, legislative support and funding are critical for ensuring that on-ground management is successful in halting the decline of Australia\u27s threatened species

Calculating the benefit of conservation actions

The benefit (or additionality) attributable to a conservation action is the difference between the outcomes of two scenarios: (1) the scenario with the conservation action, and (2) the alternative scenario, in which action did not occur. However, many conservation decisions are made using approaches that do not appropriately calculate this benefit. We review recent scientific literature and conservation policies to examine how conservation benefit is calculated in three situations: systematic reserve selection, investment in agri-environment schemes, and biodiversity offset trades. In the examples we considered, the approaches used to calculate conservation benefit often involved assumptions about the alternative scenario that were not explicit, demonstrably wrong or both. We suggest that assumptions about how conservation value changes over time in the alternative scenario can often be substantially refined, and that making these assumptions explicit by calculating directly the expected difference between the two scenarios is likely to improve the quality of conservation decision-making