Print PageGiven limited resources, it is important to focus conservation efforts where they will have the greatest benefit. Selecting areas of high conservation concern is made more difficult when planning over large regions that may have a complex mix of different species and habitats, all with different conservation priorities. Making trade-offs among conservation targets may result in very different priority areas. Our objective was to determine what effects different tradeoffs among species and/or habitats had on the spatial arrangement of priority areas for bird conservation. We worked with a multi-state region of the Coastal Plain ecosystem of the Southeastern United States. Our first step was to create spatially-explicit models for each habitat using occurrence data for appropriate species, existing protected areas, landforms and land cover/land use. We hypothesized high priority conservation areas would overlap extensively requiring conservation tradeoffs among habitats.
Results/Conclusions
We created four different methods to break ties in overlapping areas: 1) priority was given to the habitat with less total area over the entire landscape; 2) priority was given to the habitat with less area within each state; 3) priority was given to the habitat with the greatest number of threatened and/or endangered species; 4) priority was given to the habitat with the most highly imperiled species. Our different prioritization schemes included 45 species in 12 habitats. Several high priority habitats overlapped significantly. Frequently overlapping habitats included open pine forest, hardwood/pine mixed forest and grasslands; and riparian forests and freshwater wetlands. The four tie-breaking schemes produced very different priority maps that represent different conservation objectives. Our results emphasize the need to carefully identify the values of stakeholders when developing large-scale conservation plans.
