As Earth experiences the sixth mass extinction, conservation initiatives are increasingly becoming more imperative. Conservation planning relies on species distributions to identify the areas most suited for implementing conservation efforts, such as protected areas. However, the uneven distribution of biodiversity and limited funding call for the use of prioritization methods that would select the least number of sites that represent all species. Few studies in the literature have addressed the effectiveness of prioritization methods at the global scale. Many of those studies have focused on threatened species richness as the basis for selecting biodiversity hotspots for conservation, yet other studies have shown that this approach is not effective because it does not account for endemism or vulnerability of certain species. Therefore, a major challenge in conservation planning is to identify conservation areas for species. For terrestrial species, this is less of a challenge because the data available are less limited than those of marine systems. Studies that used complementarity-based prioritization approaches have proved to be more effective than species richness-based prioritization when tested using terrestrial mammals. Here we test complementarity-based approaches to determine global geographic patterns of sites conservation values for marine mammal diversity, and compare to species richness-based prioritization.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results suggest that species richness-based prioritization for marine mammals is an ineffective approach to conservation planning, because the sites selected based on this approach protect less species than would be protected by random site selection. Our results also support the hypothesis that complementarity-based approaches outcompete species richness-based prioritization because they show the most proximity to an ideal scenario of species protection coverage. We believe that complementarity-based approaches can become a successful tool in marine mammal conservation planning as they have already shown to be for terrestrial mammals. In the future, we will pursue subsequent studies that include other marine taxa. Our study is important because it provides an alternative, more effective approach to conservation planning, and because some of the tools we test require fewer resources than conventional approaches. This is especially relevant for underdeveloped countries where the need for accessible conservation planning tools is greatest given the increased concentration of biodiversity. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to test these approaches in marine systems at the global scale.