Better practices for reporting on conservation

Abstract

Trend indicators are the primary approach used for reporting on biodiversity worldwide, but often poorly inform conservation policy and management. Here, we show how the field of systematic conservation planning offers approaches for biodiversity reporting to foster better adaptation and accountability by estimating the difference made by conservation interventions; identifying how changes in biodiversity contribute to conservation goals, accounting for unequal and complementary contributions; and evaluating cost-effectiveness of interventions. By recognizing that biodiversity reporting and conservation prioritization must inform each other as an adaptive process, we show how they share data needs and methodologies, including distributions and abundances of features and pressures, predictions of future changes in features under different pressures, distributions of different interventions and their associated costs, and stepwise models aggregating contributions to an overall goal. Incorporating prioritization-based approaches into biodiversity reporting will enable more robust conservation decisions than would be possible based on simple trend indicators.