Actions not species: Prioritization of conservation actions through structured decision making

Background/Question/Methods

Large scale conservation is often constrained by a variety of factors, including limited budgets, large areas of uncertainty about conservation outcomes and environmental variation (including climate change), and diverse stakeholder values, among others. Despite these constraints prioritization is often vital to ensuring that resources are distributed in a way that best meets the ecosystem and stakeholder’s needs, though now that prioritization should take place is not always clear. Many frameworks have been put forward for addressing this problem, including the umbrella species concept, and other frameworks where a species, or list of species are created and used to prioritize conservation.
Results/Conclusions
Based on the work of Game et al (2013 Conservation Biology), the Gulf of Mexico Avian Monitoring Network have phrased this problem a different way, and have instead prioritized management, restoration and conservation actions, instead of species, allowing us to be more transparent, better meet stakeholder values. Here we will examine the relationship between the prioritization of actions versus species and possible interactions with landcover type and geographic scale.