Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Source Publication
Nature Communications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-21-2017
DOI
10.1038/s41467-017-02399-y
Abstract
Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods. We combine a simulation approach with a case study of forests in the eastern United States, paying particular attention to how covariation between ecological benefits and economic costs influences agreement levels. For many conservation goals, agreement over spatial priorities improves with ROI methods. However, we also show that a reliance on ROI-based prioritization can sometimes exacerbate disagreements over priorities. As such, accounting for costs in conservation planning does not enable society to sidestep careful consideration of the ecological goals of conservation.
Recommended Citation
Paul Armsworth, Heather B. Jackson, Seong-Hoon Cho, Melissa Clark, Joseph E. Fargione, Gwenllian D. Iacona, Taeyoung Kim, Eric R. Larson, Thomas Minney, Nathan A. Sutton. “Factoring Economic Costs into Conservation Planning May Not Improve Agreement Over Priorities for Protection.” Nature Communications 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02399-y.
Submission Type
Publisher's Version
Comments
This article was published openly thanks to the University of Tennessee Open Publishing Support Fund.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.