Conservation Targets And Information Needs For Regional Conservation Planning

Modern conservation planning is systematic and oriented toward protection of rare or otherwise highly valued elements of biodiversity, representation of ecosystems, and maintenance of viable populations of focal species. Often these three approaches have been pursued in isolation. Combining them results in a more comprehensive and robust conservation strategy, but also requires the acquisition and analysis of tremendous quantities of data. Therefore, data limitations can be a significant impediment to rapid progress in conservation planning. I identify the primary surrogates of biodiversity used in current approaches to conservation planning and discuss the kinds and quality of data required. Criteria for narrowing the list of potential conservation targets to those that will be most useful include: (1) Validity: The target must be an element of conservation interest in its own right or have a well-documented or compelling relationship to such elements; (2) Data availability and uniformity: Information on selected targets must be readily available as digital, spatial databases that are relatively uniform and continuous in distribution across the planning region in order to avoid biases; and (3) Complementarity and comprehensiveness: The suite of targets selected should be complementary and span a broad spectrum of biodiversity or environmental variation. In order to make existing data more useful to conservation planning, governments should create coordinated national or continental information systems that include data on multiple surrogates of biodiversity