Synergies of management actions between species and community focused approaches to protecting threatened biodiversity

Abstract

Conservation efforts have focused largely on species, yet ecosystem management is suggested to be a more efficient strategy for biodiversity management. With increasing numbers of threatened species, ecosystems and ecological communities, and limited resources, an approach that delivers the best conservation outcomes across multiple levels of biodiversity is crucial. In this study, we compared a species approach and a community approach to management by evaluating the number of threatened species benefiting from actions targeted at threatened ecological communities (TECs), and vice versa. We ran three analyses: one theoretical, and two spatially-explicit analyses accounting for co-occurrence in distributions and site-based actions. We found that of 124 actions, 61 were common to species and TECs. Yet, the overlap of actions was lower when considering species and TEC co-occurrences across the distributions, and was mostly lost at the site-scale. In all analyses, focusing on species management resulted in a greater percentage of actions considered, thus potentially benefiting more species and TECs. We suggest that when there is limited capacity to perform formal prioritization analyses, our process could identify actions addressing widespread and common threats impacting both species and communities. Further, simultaneously managing both species and TECs would potentially deliver a more effective solution.