4 research outputs found
Using a Systematic Approach to Select Flagship Species for Bird Conservation
Conservation marketing campaigns that focus on flagship species play a vital role in biological
diversity conservation because they raise funds and change people’s behavior. However, most flagship species
are selected without considering the target audience of the campaign, which can hamper the campaign’s
effectiveness. To address this problem, we used a systematic and stakeholder-driven approach to select flagship
species for a conservation campaign in the Serra do Urubu in northeastern Brazil. We based our techniques
on environmental economic and marketing methods. We used choice experiments to examine the species
attributes that drive preference and latent-class models to segment respondents into groups by preferences and
socioeconomic characteristics. We used respondent preferences and information on bird species inhabiting
the Serra do Urubu to calculate a flagship species suitability score. We also asked respondents to indicate
their favorite species from a set list to enable comparison between methods. The species’ traits that drove
audience preference were geographic distribution, population size, visibility, attractiveness, and survival in
captivity. However, the importance of these factors differed among groups and groups differed in their views
on whether species with small populations and the ability to survive in captivity should be prioritized. The
popularity rankings of species differed between approaches, a result that was probably related to the different
ways in which the 2 methods measured preference. Our new approach is a transparent and evidence-based
method that can be used to refine the way stakeholders are engaged in the design of conservation marketing
campaigns