Influence of a Threatened‐Species Focus on Conservation Planning

Abstract: Conservation efforts at local, regional, and global scales often focus on threatened species despite recent calls to adopt more equitable and potentially more economically rational approaches. Critics contend that conservation planning centered only on threatened species fails to deliver cost‐efficient conservation outcomes. We explored how planning to preserve threatened mammal species would influence the efficiency and effectiveness of conservation investments in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. We found that the explicit protection of threatened species delivered cost‐efficient outcomes in this situation, afforded adequate protection to over 90% of those species not yet considered endangered, and contributed to the partial protection of the remainder. We used Marxan, a conservation planning tool, to determine the frequency that planning units are selected in efficient reserve systems and assessed the relative risk of deforestation of each planning unit. Our methods allowed us to identify areas of the region that require the most urgent conservation action.     

Variance and Uncertainty in the Expected Number of Occurrences in Reserve Selection

Abstract:  Reserve selection often concerns the design of reserve networks for the long-term maintenance of biodiversity. We considered uncertainty in the context of three common reserve-selection formulations, the expected number of populations, proportional coverage of land-cover types, and the probability of having at least one population. By uncertainty, we mean variance in the outcome of any probability-based reserve selection formulation. A typical reserve-selection formulation might ask for the least expensive set of sites that contains n populations per species. It is implicit here that this requirement concerns the expected number of populations, which actually is obtained only with a 50% chance. If the requirement is changed to select the least expensive set of sites that gives n populations per species with a 95% probability, the number of sites required in the solution increases and the identity of the sites is changed toward sites that have high probabilities of persistence (or occurrence) and low associated binomial variance. Anthropogenic threat is one factor that may cause probabilistic uncertainty in the context of proportional area coverage.     

复杂电磁环境中电磁威胁度评估仿真软件设计

主要针对复杂电磁环境中的电子设备进行电磁威胁度的评估预测,建立了威胁度评估模型,设定了威胁度等级判定,并利用计算机技术将复杂电磁环境预测仿真进行了软件方面的设计与实现。     

Optimal Allocation of Resources among Threatened Species: a Project Prioritization Protocol

Abstract: Conservation funds are grossly inadequate to address the plight of threatened species. Government and conservation organizations faced with the task of conserving threatened species desperately need simple strategies for allocating limited resources. The academic literature dedicated to systematic priority setting usually recommends ranking species on several criteria, including level of endangerment and metrics of species value such as evolutionary distinctiveness, ecological importance, and social significance. These approaches ignore 2 crucial factors: the cost of management and the likelihood that the management will succeed. These oversights will result in misallocation of scarce conservation resources and possibly unnecessary losses. We devised a project prioritization protocol (PPP) to optimize resource allocation among New Zealand's threatened‐species projects, where costs, benefits (including species values), and the likelihood of management success were considered simultaneously. We compared the number of species managed and the expected benefits gained with 5 prioritization criteria: PPP with weightings based on species value; PPP with species weighted equally; management costs; species value; and threat status. We found that the rational use of cost and success information substantially increased the number of species managed, and prioritizing management projects according to species value or threat status in isolation was inefficient and resulted in fewer species managed. In addition, we found a clear trade‐off between funding management of a greater number of the most cost‐efficient and least risky projects and funding fewer projects to manage the species of higher value. Specifically, 11 of 32 species projects could be funded if projects were weighted by species value compared with 16 projects if projects were not weighted. This highlights the value of a transparent decision‐making process, which enables a careful consideration of trade‐offs. The use of PPP can substantially improve conservation outcomes for threatened species by increasing efficiency and ensuring transparency of management decisions.     

Use of surrogate species to cost-effectively prioritize conservation actions

Conservation efforts often focus on umbrella species whose distributions overlap with many other flora and fauna. However, because biodiversity is affected by different threats that are spatially variable, focusing only on the geographic range overlap of species may not be sufficient in allocating the necessary actions needed to efficiently abate threats. We developed a problem-based method for prioritizing conservation actions for umbrella species that maximizes the total number of flora and fauna benefiting from management while considering threats, actions, and costs. We tested our new method by assessing the performance of the Australian federal government's umbrella prioritization list, which identifies 73 umbrella species as priorities for conservation attention. Our results show that the federal government priority list benefits only 6% of all Australia's threatened terrestrial species. This could be increased to benefit nearly half (or 46%) of all threatened terrestrial species for the same budget of AU$550 million/year if more suitable umbrella species were chosen. This results in a 7-fold increase in management efficiency. We believe nations around the world can markedly improve the selection of prioritized umbrella species for conservation action with this transparent, quantitative, and objective prioritization approach.     

Self-identity threat and resistance to change: Evidence from regular travel behaviour

Despite widespread acceptance of the need to change individual behaviour towards sustainability, resistance to change remains a continuing challenge. Past behaviour or habit, and psychological reactance, have been explored as components of resistance. Growing evidence for the influence of self-identity on behaviour suggests self-identity as a further factor. The current study draws on Identity Process Theory (Breakwell, 1986) to propose that threat to self-identity contributes to resistance to change, over and above the influence of past behaviour. Using travel-related vignettes to trigger threat, a study with 295 working parents in England found evidence supporting the relationship between self-identity threat and resistance to change travel behaviour, controlling for past behaviour. The findings further suggest identity threat as an alternative theoretical perspective on reactance. The results build theoretical understanding of resistance as a barrier to behaviour change. The application of an identity theory to understanding resistance is argued to add potentially new ways to encourage change towards sustainable behaviour. In addition, the findings suggest rich avenues for future research on the theoretical and empirical implications of the relationship of identities and sustainable behaviours.     

Understanding the drivers of expert opinion when classifying species as extinct

The criteria as laid out by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List are the gold standard by which the extinction risk of a species is assessed and where appropriate biological extinctions are declared. However, unlike all other categories, the category of extinct lacks a quantitative framework for assigning this category. Given its subjective nature, we surveyed expert assessors working on a diversity of taxa to explore the attributes they used to declare a species extinct. Using a choice experiment approach, we surveyed 674 experts from the IUCN Species Survival Commission specialist groups and taskforces. Data availability, time from the last sighting, detectability, habitat availability, and population decline were all important attributes favored by assessors when inferring extinction. Respondents with red-listing experience assigned more importance to the attributes data availability, time from the last sighting, and detectability when considering a species extinction, whereas those respondents working with well-known taxa gave more importance to the time from the last sighting. Respondents with no red-listing experience and those working with more well-known taxa (i.e., mammals and birds) were overall less likely to consider species extinct. Our findings on the importance assessors place on attributes used to declare a species extinct provide a basis for informing the development of specific criteria for more accurately assessing species extinctions.     

Quantifying and mapping species threat abatement opportunities to support national target setting

The successful implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will rely on effective translation of targets from global to national level and increased engagement across diverse sectors of society. Species conservation targets require policy support measures that can be applied to a diversity of taxonomic groups, that link action targets to outcome goals, and that can be applied to both global and national data sets to account for national context, which the species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric does. To test the flexibility of STAR, we applied the metric to vascular plants listed on national red lists of Brazil, Norway, and South Africa. The STAR metric uses data on species’ extinction risk, distributions, and threats, which we obtained from national red lists to quantify the contribution that threat abatement and habitat restoration activities could make to reducing species’ extinction risk. Across all 3 countries, the greatest opportunity for reducing plant species’ extinction risk was from abating threats from agricultural activities, which could reduce species’ extinction risk by 54% in Norway, 36% in South Africa, and 29% in Brazil. Species extinction risk could be reduced by a further 21% in South Africa by abating threats from invasive species and by 21% in Brazil by abating threats from urban expansion. Even with different approaches to red-listing among countries, the STAR metric yielded informative results that identified where the greatest conservation gains could be made for species through threat-abatement and restoration activities. Quantifiably linking local taxonomic coverage and data collection to global processes with STAR would allow national target setting to align with global targets and enable state and nonstate actors to measure and report on their potential contributions to species conservation.     

吉林向海自然保护区湿地资源的保护

在分析吉林向海自然保护区湿地资源现状及其保护意义的基础上 ,针对湿地资源受到的严重威胁 ,提出了保护对策。