title: Environmental offsets, resilience and cost-effective conservation.
abstract: Conservation management agencies are faced with acute trade-offs when dealing with disturbance from human activities. We show how agencies can respond to permanent ecosystem disruption by managing for Pimm resilience within a conservation budget using a model calibrated to a metapopulation of a coral reef fish species at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia. The application is of general interest because it provides a method to manage species susceptible to negative environmental disturbances by optimizing between the number and quality of migration connections in a spatially distributed metapopulation. Given ecological equivalency between the number and quality of migration connections in terms of time to recover from disturbance, our approach allows conservation managers to promote ecological function, under budgetary constraints, by offsetting permanent damage to one ecological function with investment in another.
authors.affiliation: CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, GPO Box 1538 , Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia ; Crawford School of Public Policy , The Australian National University, Building no. 132, Lennox Crossing , Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia.
authors.forename: L R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Little
authors.affiliation: Crawford School of Public Policy , The Australian National University, Building no. 132, Lennox Crossing , Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia.
authors.forename: R Q
authors.initials: RQ
authors.lastname: Grafton
keywords: conservation budgets; ecological equivalency; offsets; resilience; substitutability