title: Benefits of integrating complementarity into priority threat management.
abstract: Conservation decision tools based on cost-effectiveness analysis are used to assess threat management strategies for improving species persistence. These approaches rank alternative strategies by their benefit to cost ratio but may fail to identify the optimal sets of strategies to implement under limited budgets because they do not account for redundancies. We devised a multiobjective optimization approach in which the complementarity principle is applied to identify the sets of threat management strategies that protect the most species for any budget. We used our approach to prioritize threat management strategies for 53 species of conservation concern in the Pilbara, Australia. We followed a structured elicitation approach to collect information on the benefits and costs of implementing 17 different conservation strategies during a 3-day workshop with 49 stakeholders and experts in the biodiversity, conservation, and management of the Pilbara. We compared the performance of our complementarity priority threat management approach with a current cost-effectiveness ranking approach. A complementary set of 3 strategies: domestic herbivore management, fire management and research, and sanctuaries provided all species with >50% chance of persistence for $4.7 million/year over 20 years. Achieving the same result cost almost twice as much ($9.71 million/year) when strategies were selected by their cost-effectiveness ranks alone. Our results show that complementarity of management benefits has the potential to double the impact of priority threat management approaches.
authors.affiliation: CSIRO Land and Water, GPO Box 2583, Brisbane, Queensland, 4001, Australia; ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, NERP Environmental Decisions Hub, Centre for Biodiversity & Conservation Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, 4072, Australia. iadine.chades@csiro.au.
authors.forename: Iadine
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Chadés
authors.forename: Sam
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nicol
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: van Leeuwen
authors.forename: Belinda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Walters
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Firn
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Reeson
authors.forename: Tara G
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Josie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carwardine
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000191:economics* / Q000379:methods*; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D014904:Western Australia
keywords: Australia; Pareto; Pilbara; conservación; conservation; cost-effectiveness; multiobjective optimization; optimización multi-objetivo; rentabilidad