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Dams, road crossings, and water withdrawals extensively fragment rivers, and watersheds often contain hundreds or thousands of barriers, some of which no longer meet societal purposes. Accordingly, both conservationists and infrastructure managers are faced with the challenge of prioritizing barriers for repair, replacement, or removal. Candidate projects have been prioritized with dozens of methods, which span a wide range of spatial scales, data and analytical requirements, mathematical complexity, and capacity to reconcile multiple perspectives and objectives. We briefly review barrier prioritization methods from the perspective of a policy maker or manager who must balance realities of stochastic opportunities, conflicting priorities, and risk of infrastructure failure. After outlining common motivations for barrier prioritization, we present a menu of techniques ranging from large‐scale, quantitative assessments to reactive, local response to failures. By clarifying the appropriate domain for each approach, this review informs the selection of prioritization methods for restoring riverine connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Conservation Biology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Conservation Biology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Observations of species occurrences are often used to inform spatial prioritizations for the effective use of limited conservation resources. Additional species observations have the potential to change where a conservation group plans to invest. But by how much? How different would conservation priorities be if planners updated current observations with the information they will have next year?, We sought to address these questions using a 111-year data set that reflects commonly used collection and prioritization practices. We quantify changes in the ranking of Tennessee watersheds brought on by annual additions of species observations made between 1900 and 2010. We ranked watersheds by their complementary contribution to overall species richness. We examine the sensitivity of our results to the number of watersheds prioritized., We expected the effect of new observations to diminish as the data set grew, and we found this to be the case. Importantly, however, additional observations may continue to significantly change conservation priorities in the future if current data collection trends continue., We found that, overall, additional observations can greatly affect priorities and that this result is sensitive to the number of watersheds ranked. Thus, the extent of planning activities moderates the effect of including additional data., Synthesis and applications. Long-term, opportunistically collected data of species locations are commonly used in conservation planning. We find that when using such data, additional species observations significantly affect subsequent priorities. This effect is most pronounced when data are sparse. As such, data collection should be a focus of very early conservation actions in new areas. Even in well-studied areas, however, additional observations may continue to change spatial priorities into the future, and so while data collection can decrease in well-studied areas, it should continue at a lower intensity. Our methods could also be used to determine the balance of data collection and conservation action in a new location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]