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Marxan is the most common decision-support tool used to inform the design of protected-area systems. The original version of Marxan does not consider risk and uncertainty associated with threatening processes affecting protected areas, including uncertainty about the location and condition of species' populations and habitats now and in the future. We described and examined the functionality of a modified version of Marxan, Marxan with Probability. This software explicitly considers 4 types of uncertainty: probability that a feature exists in a particular place (estimated based on species distribution models or spatially explicit population models); probability that features in a site will be lost in the future due to a threatening process, such as climate change, natural catastrophes, and uncontrolled human interventions; probability that a feature will exist in the future due to natural successional processes, such as a fire or flood; and probability the feature exists but has been degraded by threatening processes, such as overfishing or pollution, and thus cannot contribute to conservation goals. We summarized the results of 5 studies that illustrate how each type of uncertainty can be used to inform protected area design. If there were uncertainty in species or habitat distribution, users could maximize the chance that these features were represented by including uncertainty using Marxan with Probability. Similarly, if threatening processes were considered, users minimized the chance that species or habitats were lost or degraded by using Marxan with Probability. Marxan with Probability opens up substantial new avenues for systematic conservation planning research and application by agencies.Marxan es la herramienta de apoyo a las decisiones que más comúnmente se usa para orientar el diseño de los sistemas de áreas protegidas. La versión original de Marxan no considera el riesgo y la incertidumbre asociados con los procesos amenazantes que afectan a las áreas protegidas, incluyendo la incertidumbre sobre la ubicación y la condición de las poblaciones de las especies y su hábitat ahora y en el futuro. Describimos y analizamos la funcionalidad de una versión modificada de Marxan: Marxan con Probabilidad. Este software considera explícitamente cuatro tipos de incertidumbre: probabilidad de que una característica exista en un lugar en particular (estimada con base en los modelos de distribución de especies o con modelos de población espacialmente explícitos); probabilidad de que las características de un sitio se pierdan en el futuro debido a un proceso amenazante, como el cambio climático, las catástrofes naturales y las intervenciones humanas descontroladas; probabilidad de que una característica existirá en el futuro debido a los procesos naturales de sucesión; como los incendios o las inundaciones; y probabilidad de que una característica exista pero haya sido degradada por los procesos amenazantes, como la sobrepesca y la contaminación, y por lo tanto no puede contribuir a los objetivos de conservación. Sintetizamos los resultados de cinco estudios que ilustraron cómo cada tipo de incertidumbre puede usarse para orientar el diseño del área protegida. Si hubiera incertidumbre en la distribución de la especie o de su hábitat, los usuarios podrían maximizar la posibilidad de que estas características estuvieran representadas mediante la inclusión de Marxan con Probabilidad. De manera similar, si los procesos amenazantes estuvieran considerados, los usuarios minimizarían la posibilidad de que se pierda la especie o degrade el hábitat usando Marxan con Probabilidad. Marxan con Probabilidad abre nuevas vías importantes para la investigación sobre la planeación sistemática de la conservación y su aplicación por parte de las agencias.Marxan 软件是指导保护区系统设计的常用决策支持工具。然而, Marxan 的原始版本没有考虑到影响保护区的威胁过程的风险和不确定性, 包括物种种群和栖息地现在及未来位置和各种条件的不确定性。我们设计并检验了改进版 Marxan 软件的功能, 即考虑可能性的 Marxan (Marxan with Probability) 。该软件明确地考虑了四种不确定性:一种特征存在于特定地点的可能性 (基于物种分布模型或空间显式种群模型估计); 一个位点的特征由于未来气候变化、自然灾害, 或不受控制的人类干预等威胁过程而消失的可能性;一种特征由于自然的连续过程, 如火灾或洪水, 在未来存在的可能性;特征虽然存在, 但由于过度捕捞或污染等威胁过程而退化, 因此不能促进保护目标实现的可能性。我们总结了五项研究的结果, 来说明每种类型的不确定性如何用于指导保护区设计。如果物种或栖息地分布存在不确定性, 用户可以通过使用 Marxan with Probability 来纳入不确定性, 从而尽可能地表示出这些特征。类似地, 如果要考虑威胁过程, 用户也可以使用 Marxan with Probability 将物种或栖息地丧失或退化的可能性降至最低。 Marxan with Probability 这一软件为各机构的系统保护规划研究和应用开辟了重要新途径。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】.

The optimal design of reserve networks and fisheries closures depends on species occurrence information and knowledge of how anthropogenic impacts interact with the species concerned. However, challenges in surveying mobile and cryptic species over adequate spatial and temporal scales can mask the importance of particular habitats, leading to uncertainty about which areas to protect to optimize conservation efforts. We investigated how telemetry-derived locations can help guide the scale and timing of fisheries closures with the aim of reducing threatened species bycatch. Forty juvenile speartooth sharks (Glyphis glyphis) were monitored over 22 months with implanted acoustic transmitters and an array of hydrophone receivers. Using the decision-support tool Marxan, we formulated a permanent fisheries closure that prioritized areas used more frequently by tagged sharks and considered areas perceived as having high value to fisheries. To explore how the size of the permanent closure compared with an alternative set of time-area closures (i.e., where different areas were closed to fishing at different times of year), we used a cluster analysis to group months that had similar arrangements of selected planning units (informed by shark movements during that month) into 2 time-area closures. Sharks were consistent in their timing and direction of migratory movements, but the number of tagged sharks made a big difference in the placement of the permanent closure; 30 individuals were needed to capture behavioral heterogeneity. The dry-season (May-January) and wet-season (February-April) time-area closures opened 20% and 25% more planning units to fishing, respectively, compared with the permanent closure with boundaries fixed in space and time. Our results show that telemetry has the potential to inform and improve spatial management of mobile species and that the temporal component of tracking data can be incorporated into prioritizations to reduce possible impacts of spatial closures on established fisheries.Uso de Información de Movimiento Basada en Individuos para Identificar las Prioridades de Conservación Espacial para las Especies Móviles Resumen El diseño óptimo de redes de reservas y los cierres de pesquerías depende de la información sobre la presencia de especies y del conocimiento sobre cómo los impactos antropogénicos interactúan con las especies afectadas. Sin embargo, las dificultades que existen al monitorear especies móviles y crípticas en escalas espaciales y temporales adecuadas pueden enmascarar la importancia de los hábitats particulares, lo que resulta en incertidumbre con respecto a cuáles áreas proteger para optimizar los esfuerzos de conservación. Investigamos cómo las ubicaciones derivadas de la telemetría pueden ayudar a guiar la escala y el momento justo del cierre de las pesquerías con el objetivo de reducir la captura accesoria de especies amenazadas. Se monitorearon 40 tiburones lanza juveniles (Glyphis glyphis) durante 22 meses con transmisores acústicos implantados y una selección de receptores hidrofónicos. Con la herramienta de apoyo para la toma de decisiones Marxan, formulamos un cierre de pesquerías permanente que priorizó las áreas usadas con frecuencia por los tiburones marcados y que consideraba a las áreas percibidas como altamente valiosas para las pesquerías. Para explorar cómo el tamaño del cierre permanente se comparaba con un conjunto de cierres con áreas y tiempos alternativos (es decir, donde las áreas se cerraron a la pesca en diferentes momentos del año) usamos un análisis de clúster para agrupar los meses que tuvieron arreglos similares a las unidades de planeación seleccionadas (informadas por el movimiento de los tiburones durante ese mes) en dos cierres de tiempo-área. Los tiburones fueron consistentes en el tiempo y dirección de sus movimientos migratorios, pero el número de tiburones marcados generó una gran diferencia en la ubicación del cierre permanente; se necesitaron 30 individuos para capturar la heterogeneidad del comportamiento. Los cierres de tiempo-área de la temporada de secas (mayo - enero) y la de lluvias (febrero - abril) abrieron a la pesca un 20% y 25% más de unidades de planeación, respectivamente, en comparación con el cierre permanente con barreras fijas en el tiempo y el espacio. Nuestros resultados muestran que la telemetría tiene el potencial para informar y mejorar el manejo espacial de las especies móviles y que el componente temporal de los datos de rastreo puede ser incorporado a las priorizaciones para reducir los posibles impactos del manejo sobre las pesquerías establecidas.保护区网络和禁渔区的最佳设计需要依赖物种出现信息以及人为影响与相关物种互作的知识。然而, 在适当的时空尺度下调查移动且隐秘的物种仍是一项挑战, 它可能会掩盖特定生境的重要性, 导致难以确定应保护哪些地区以获得最大的保护成效。本研究分析了遥感获得的位点如何帮助指导禁渔范围和时间, 以减少对受胁迫物种的误捕。我们利用植入声波发射器和一批水下声波接收器对四十只露齿鲨 (Glyphis glyphis) 的亚成体进行了22个月的监测。利用决策支持工具 Marxan 软件, 我们制定了一个永久性禁渔计划, 优先考虑了标记鲨鱼个体频繁利用的区域, 同时也兼顾了对渔业发展有高价值的区域。为了比较永久禁渔和时间-区域禁渔（即每年不同时间在不同区域禁捕）的替代方案, 我们用聚类分析法, 在选定规划单元内根据每个月鲨鱼活动情况将有相似规划的月份分为了两个时间-区域禁渔区。结果显示, 鲨鱼在迁徙的时间和方向上是一致的, 但是标记鲨鱼的数量对永久禁渔区的位置设置影响很大, 至少需要三十个个体来记录行为异质性的信息。旱季（五月到一月）和雨季（二月到四月）的时间-区域禁渔区相比于有固定时空边界的永久禁渔区, 分别多开放了20%和25%的规划单元用于渔业发展。我们的结果表明, 遥测技术有望为移动物种的空间管理提供信息和帮助, 而追踪数据的时间成分可以纳入优先保护规划中, 以减少管理对现有渔场的可能影响。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】.

Although marine protected areas can simultaneously contribute to biodiversity conservation and fisheries management, the global network is biased toward particular ecosystem types because they have been established primarily in an ad hoc fashion. The optimization of trade-offs between biodiversity benefits and socioeconomic values increases success of protected areas and minimizes enforcement costs in the long run, but it is often neglected in marine spatial planning (MSP). Although the acquisition of spatially explicit socioeconomic data is perceived as a costly or secondary step in MSP, it is critical to account for lost opportunities by people whose activities will be restricted, especially fishers. We developed an easily reproduced habitat-based approach to estimate the spatial distribution of opportunity cost to fishers in data-poor regions. We assumed the most accessible areas have higher economic and conservation values than less accessible areas and their designation as no-take zones represents a loss of fishing opportunities. We estimated potential distribution of fishing resources from bathymetric ranges and benthic habitat distribution and the relative importance of the different resources for each port of total catches, revenues, and stakeholder perception. In our model, we combined different cost layers to produce a comprehensive cost layer so that we could evaluate of trade-offs. Our approach directly supports conservation planning, can be applied generally, and is expected to facilitate stakeholder input and community acceptance of conservation.

1. Systematic conservation planning is an essential part of biodiversity preservation. In the context of conservation prioritization problems, the total cost of the entire reserve system is highly dependent on how big we set targets (e.g. 10% or 30%) for conservation features (e.g. species or habitats). Thus, it is of interest to conservation planners how targets could be adjusted in a reasonable way, in order to decrease total cost. The aim of this paper is to rank features based on their influence on total cost.

Deciding where to implement conservation actions in order to meet conservation targets efficiently is an important component of systematic conservation planning. Mathematical optimisation is a quantitative and transparent framework for solving these problems. Despite several advantages of exact methods such as integer linear programming (ILP), most conservation planning problems to date have been solved using heuristic approaches such as simulated annealing (SA). We explain how to implement common conservation planning problems (e.g. Marxan and Marxan With Zones) in an ILP framework and how these formulations can be extended to account for spatial dependencies among planning units, such as those arising from environmental flows (e.g. rivers). Using simulated datasets, we demonstrate that ILP outperforms SA with respect to both solution quality (how close it is to optimality) and processing time over a range of problem sizes. For modestly sized quadratic problems (100,000 spatial units and 10 species), for example, a processing time of approximately 14 h was required for SA to achieve a solution within 19% of optimality, while ILP achieved solutions within 0.5% of optimality within 30 s. For the largest quadratic problems we evaluated processing time exceeding one day was required for SA to achieve a solution within 49% of optimality, while ILP achieved solutions within 0.5% of optimality in approximately one hour. Heuristics are conceptually simple and can be applied to large and non-linear objective functions but unlike ILP, produce solutions of unknown quality. We also discuss how ILP approaches also facilitate quantification of trade-off curves and sensitivity analysis. When solving linear or quadratic conservation planning problems we recommend using ILP over heuristic approaches whenever possible.

A price on carbon is driving land-use changes globally, including the establishment of biodiverse carbon plantings to sequester carbon. The biodiversity benefits of these plantings depend on many factors, including their spatial locations. We provide an approach for assessing the opportunities and spatial priorities for carbon sequestration and biodiversity restoration through biodiverse carbon plantings. Using Australia as a case study, we show how carbon market conditions affect the potential for achieving biodiversity benefits through restoring heavily cleared vegetation types to 30% of their original extent. Using a midrange carbon price, AU$20 per ton, we discovered that the top 25% of priority areas for biodiverse carbon plantings could sequester 132 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalents annually—more than 5% of Australia's emissions. Lower carbon prices limit biodiversity outcomes. Spatial priorities for sequestering carbon are different from those for restoring biodiversity; therefore, accounting for both factors maximizes efficiency and opportunities.

Animal-borne telemetry has revolutionized our ability to study animal movement, species physiology, demography and social structures, changing environments and the threats that animals are experiencing. While there will always be a need for basic ecological research and discovery, the current conservation crisis demands we look more pragmatically at the data required to make informed management decisions. Here, we define a framework that distinguishes how research using animal telemetry devices can influence conservation. We then discuss two critical questions which aim to directly connect telemetry-derived data to applied conservation decision-making: (i) Would my choice of action change if I had more data? (ii) Is the expected gain worth the money and time required to collect more data? Policy implications. To answer questions about integrating telemetry-derived data with applied conservation, we suggest the use of value of information analysis to quantitatively assess the return-on-investment of animal telemetry-derived data for conservation decision-making.

Conservation planning is the science of choosing which actions to take where for the purpose of conserving biodiversity. Creating a system of protected areas is the most common form of systematic conservation planning. Hence, we will focus on the process of protected area selection in this chapter. Marxan is the most widely used software in the world for creating marine and terrestrial protected area systems. Because conservation planning is an important job skill for conservation and resource managers, you should understand the principles involved even if you don’t use this software in your job and even if you use software other than Marxan for systematic conservation planning. From this chapter, we would like you to.

Scenario planning can be useful to guide decision-making under uncertainty. While systematic conservation planning can create protected-area networks for multiple and complex reserve-design scenarios, planners rarely compare different reserve networks explicitly, or quantify trade-offs among scenarios. We demonstrate the use of multivariate statistics traditionally applied in community ecology to compare reserves designed under different scenarios, using conservation planning for beaches in South Africa as an example. Twelve reserve-design scenarios were run in Marxan in a hierarchical experimental design with three levels: including/excluding the probability of site destruction; two different cost types; and three different configurations of existing terrestrial and marine reserves. Multivariate statistics proved to be useful tools in the conservation planning context. In our case study, they showed that the trade-off associated with including the probability of site destruction during coastal reserve design depended on the cost type: if the cost is related to the site-destruction probability then reserves are significantly larger; if not, then reserves are significantly more costly. In both cases, the configuration of existing reserves locked a priori into the solutions was more important and resulted in significantly larger and more costly reserves.Synthesis and applications. This study demonstrates a novel application of multivariate statistical tools to robustly quantify potential trade-offs among diverse sets of reserve-design scenarios. These statistics can be applied: to support negotiations with stakeholders and decision-makers regarding reserve configurations in the face of uncertainty; in reserve-design sensitivity analyses; and in priority setting for future research and data collection to improve conservation plans.

In any given region, there are multiple options for terrestrial protected area networks that achieve goals for conservation of terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem values. When deciding on the location of terrestrial protected areas, planners typically focus only on terrestrial conservation goals, ignoring potential linked benefits to marine ecosystems. These benefits include maintenance of downstream water quality, as forest protection can prevent changes in amount and composition of river runoff that negatively impacts coral reefs. This study aims to determine the benefit of different terrestrial reserve networks to the condition of coral reefs adjacent to the main islands of Fiji to support the work of Fiji's Protected Area Committee in expanding the national protected area estate through integrated land–sea planning. Options for terrestrial protected area networks were designed using six approaches, where the primary objective of each approach was to either achieve terrestrial conservation goals (e.g., represent 40% of each vegetation type) or maximize benefits to coral reefs by minimizing potential for land-based runoff. When achieving terrestrial conservation goals was the primary objective, the potential benefits to coral reef condition were 7.7–10.4% greater than benefits from the existing network of protected areas. When benefiting reefs was the primary objective, benefits to coral reefs were 1.1–2.8 times greater per unit area than networks designed to only achieve terrestrial conservation goals, but 31–44% of the terrestrial conservation goals were not achieved. These results are already being used by Fiji's Protected Area Committee to modify the boundaries of existing priority places to deliver outcomes that better meet terrestrial conservation goals while offering greater benefits to coral reef condition through prevention of run-off.

Triple–bottom-line outcomes from resource management and conservation, where conservation goals and equity in social outcomes are maximized while overall costs are minimized, remain a highly sought-after ideal. However, despite widespread recognition of the importance that equitable distribution of benefits or costs across society can play in conservation success, little formal theory exists for how to explicitly incorporate equity into conservation planning and prioritization. Here, we develop that theory and implement it for three very different case studies in California (United States), Raja Ampat (Indonesia), and the wider Coral Triangle region (Southeast Asia). We show that equity tends to trade off nonlinearly with the potential to achieve conservation objectives, such that similar conservation outcomes can be possible with greater equity, to a point. However, these case studies also produce a range of trade-off typologies between equity and conservation, depending on how one defines and measures social equity, including direct (linear) and no trade-off. Important gaps remain in our understanding, most notably how equity influences probability of conservation success, in turn affecting the actual ability to achieve conservation objectives. Results here provide an important foundation for moving the science and practice of conservation planning—and broader spatial planning in general—toward more consistently achieving efficient, equitable, and effective outcomes.

Creating large conservation zones in remote areas, with less intense stakeholder overlap and limited environmental information, requires periodic review to ensure zonation mitigates primary threats and fill gaps in representation, while achieving conservation targets. Follow-up reviews can utilise improved methods and data, potentially identifying new planning options yielding a desirable balance between stakeholder interests. This research explored a marine zoning system in north-west Australia–a biodiverse area with poorly documented biota. Although remote, it is economically significant (i.e. petroleum extraction and fishing). Stakeholder engagement was used to source the best available biodiversity and socio-economic data and advanced spatial analyses produced 765 high resolution data layers, including 674 species distributions representing 119 families. Gap analysis revealed the current proposed zoning system as inadequate, with 98.2% of species below the Convention on Biological Diversity 10% representation targets. A systematic conservation planning algorithm Maxan provided zoning options to meet representation targets while balancing this with industry interests. Resulting scenarios revealed that conservation targets could be met with minimal impacts on petroleum and fishing industries, with estimated losses of 4.9% and 7.2% respectively. The approach addressed important knowledge gaps and provided a powerful and transparent method to reconcile industry interests with marine conservation.

Coral reefs are threatened by human activities on both the land (e.g., deforestation) and the sea (e.g., overfishing). Most conservation planning for coral reefs focuses on removing threats in the sea, neglecting management actions on the land. A more integrated approach to coral reef conservation, inclusive of land-sea connections, requires an understanding of how and where terrestrial conservation actions influence reefs. We address this by developing a land-sea planning approach to inform fine-scale spatial management decisions and test it in Fiji. Our aim is to determine where the protection of forest can deliver the greatest return on investment for coral reef ecosystems. To assess the benefits of conservation to coral reefs, we estimate their relative condition as influenced by watershed-based pollution and fishing. We calculate the cost-effectiveness of protecting forest and find that investments deliver rapidly diminishing returns for improvements to relative reef condition. For example, protecting 2% of forest in one area is almost 500 times more beneficial than protecting 2% in another area, making prioritization essential. For the scenarios evaluated, relative coral reef condition could be improved by 8-58% if all remnant forest in Fiji were protected rather than deforested. Finally, we determine the priority of each coral reef for implementing a marine protected area when all remnant forest is protected for conservation. The general results will support decisions made by the Fiji Protected Area Committee as they establish a national protected area network that aims to protect 20% of the land and 30% of the inshore waters by 2020. Although challenges remain, we can inform conservation decisions around the globe by tackling the complex issues relevant to integrated land-sea planning.

The southern cassowary Casuarius casuarius johnsonii L. is an endangered flightless bird from northern Australia. The cassowaries' rainforest habitat has been extensively cleared, and the population primarily exists within discrete protected areas. They do, however, venture outside the reserves into modified landscapes, and it is here they are exposed to threatening pro- cesses. We used GPS-based telemetry and the adaptive local convex hull (a-LoCoH) non-paramet- ric kernel method to define the relationship between cassowary home range (HR) and a protec- tion-area network. The study showed that: (1) females had a larger HR than males; (2) overlapping HR occurred between but not within the sexes; (3) HRs of the same sex partitioned along defined boundaries; and (4) the current protected areas only encompassed core HR for the inhabiting cas- sowaries. This information was incorporated within a spatial-conservation-prioritisation analysis to define the relative cost:benefit relationship for protecting the currently non-protected land utilised by the cassowaries. The results showed that the current reserve system may accommodate up to 24 adult cassowaries, only offering HR protection at the 40 to 60% a-LoCoH. This could be raised, relatively cheaply (1.2-fold the current costs), to 70% a-LoCoH for all birds by protecting adjacent forested areas on private land. Protection beyond the 70% a-LoCoH, however, required protection of large expanses of agricultural land, resulting in an exponential increase in monetary cost (5.1-fold). We argue that total HR protection for the cassowaries was an unfeasible conserva- tion option, but protection of core habitat was achieved relatively cheaply. Combining core HS protection with target incentives to landowners of adjacent cleared land may be the most cost- effective conservation strategy for C.c. johnsonii.

Zonae Cogito is a free software package that couples Marxan with a MapWindow GIS interface to provide practitioners with an easy to use GIS to support Marxan analysis. In addition to providing a method for visualizing Marxan output, Zonae Cogito extends the basic Marxan functionality to better support an iterative and interactive design process. Zonae Cogito introduces the ability to modify and refine networks identified in Marxan, and extends the basic reporting functionality of Marxan beyond features directly considered in the analysis. Zonae Cogito also introduces new tools that allow spatial flexibility in the proposed protected area networks to be more effectively leveraged during the design process, and facilitates better information flow through interoperability with other software packages.

Climate warming challenges our approach to building systems of protected areas because it is likely to drive accelerating shifts in species distributions, and the projections of those future species distributions are uncertain. There are several important sources of uncertainty intrinsic to using species occurrence projections for reserve system design including uncertainty in the number of occurrences captured by any reserve selection solution, and uncertainty arising from the different approaches used to fit predictive models. Here we used the present and future predicted distributions of Iberian herptiles to analyze how dynamics and uncertainty in species distributions may affect decisions about resource allocation for conservation in space and time. We identified priority areas maximizing coverage of current and future (2020 and 2080) predicted distributions of 65 species, under “Mild” and “Severe” uncertainty. Next, we applied a return-on-investment analysis to quantify and make explicit trade-offs between investing in areas selected when optimizing for different times and with different uncertainty levels. Areas identified as important for conservation in every time frame and uncertainty level were the ones considered to be robust climate adaptation investments, and included chiefly already protected areas. Areas identified only under “Mild” uncertainty were considered good candidates for investment if extra resources are available and were mainly located in northern Iberia. However, areas selected only in the “Severe” uncertainty case should not be completely disregarded as they may become climatic refugia for some species. Our study provides an objective methodology to deliver “no regrets” conservation investments.

This software note describes an extension to the conservation planning package Marxan in which multiple solutions can be evaluated instead of only relying on the measures of best solution and irreplaceability. For this extension we coupled Marxan with the statistical software R. The pool of possible conservation plans is transferred from Marxan into R - which returns an ordination plot, as well as a cluster dendrogram that can be used to evaluate similarity of solutions. Also, the most efficient solutions per group are flagged. We believe that identification of alternative planning options facilitates review and implementation of Marxan solutions as negotiating parties have multiple alternative starting points.

Aim Using a probabilistic modelling framework, we aimed to incorporate landscape spatiotemporal dynamics into reserve design. We employed a spatially explicit stochastic model, which integrates both hydrological and biological processes, to simulate the wetland’s biological succession. Location Pantanal wetland (with 140,000 km2) between Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Methods We used the reserve design software Marxan to optimize the current and future representation (up to 50 years) of 20% of five plant communities with maximum reliability (i.e. smallest uncertainty). The Kappa statistic was used to compare selection frequencies of individual sites through a set of planning timeframes (5, 17, 25 and 50 years) and the likely pattern of biological succession over these periods. Results Solutions based on static vegetation distributions were significantly dissimilar from solutions based on the expected modelled changes resulting from the flood disturbance and succession dynamics. Increasing the required reliability of biodiversity outcomes resulted in more expensive reserve solutions. We demonstrated the flexibility of probabilistic decision-making methods to illuminate the trade-offs between reliability and efficiency of site selection. Main conclusions Considering the importance of habitat heterogeneity to the principles and practice of systematic conservation planning, it is notable that landscape dynamics have not been a central theme in conservation planning. In the case of the Pantanal hydrosere, acknowledging and planning for temporal dynamics required an ability to model succession and define acceptable levels of outcome reliability, but ultimately improved the long-term Adequacy of resulting reserve networks.

The design of Biosphere Reserves (BR) poses an interesting problem for systematic planning. It entails a spatially explicitly compromise between economic, social, cultural and biodiversity protection objectives, in a sustainable development context. The global network of Biosphere Reserves includes 563 sites in 110 countries. Currently the spatial configuration of BRs follows a nested scheme, where different land use regimes are assigned to zones in an ad hoc fashion, which complicates the evaluation of their effectiveness. So far in the literature, have not been designed to achieve quantitative objectives, which could limit their value for sustainable development. Using the newly developed version of the software MARXAN (c), we solve part of this problem enabling BRs to reach predefined set of spatially explicit quantitative targets, while minimizing the reserves' overall costs (i.e. opportunity, implementation, land value, etc.). Our case study is the Pantanal Biosphere Reserve (PBR), in Brazil. According to our results the PBR could substantially improve its effectiveness if a systematic review of its objectives and goals is performed. Rearrangements of all zones proved to be necessary. Core zones for example, composed of IUCN categories I to IV, increased from its current 1.5% of the BR area to 18.5% to reach all objectives. The absence of quantitative guidelines from UNESCO for the configuration of BRs has limited their effectiveness. Our quantitative systematic approach provided the first insights into potential requirements for zone partitioning, prescribing 22 +/- 5% to be allocated in core zones, 22 +/- 3% in buffer zones, and 33 +/- 4% in transition zones. The most useful outcome, however, was the flexibility the software offered to reach multiple objectives simultaneously.

Spatially explicit information on the financial costs of conservation actions can improve the ability of conservation planning to achieve ecological and economic objectives, but the magnitude of this improvement may depend on the accuracy of the cost estimates. Data on costs of conservation actions are inherently uncertain. For example, the cost of purchasing a property for addition to a protected-area network depends on the individual landholder's preferences, values, and aspirations, all of which vary in space and time, and the effect of this uncertainty on the conservation priority of a site is relatively untested. We investigated the sensitivity of the conservation priority of sites to uncertainty in cost estimates. We explored scenarios for expanding (four-fold) the protected-area network in Queensland, Australia to represent a range of vegetation types, species, and abiotic environments, while minimizing the cost of purchasing new properties. We estimated property costs for 17, 790 10 x 10 km sites with data on unimproved land values. We systematically changed property costs and noted how these changes affected conservation priority of a site. The sensitivity of the priority of a site to changes in cost data was largely dependent on a site's importance for meeting conservation targets. Sites that were essential or unimportant for meeting targets maintained high or low priorities, respectively, regardless of cost estimates. Sites of intermediate conservation priority were sensitive to property costs and represented the best option for efficiency gains, especially if they could be purchased at a lower price than anticipated. Thus, uncertainty in cost estimates did not impede the use of cost data in conservation planning, and information on the sensitivity of the conservation priority of a site to estimates of the price of land can be used to inform strategic conservation planning before the actual price of the land is known. © 2010 University of Queensland. Journal compilation © 2010 Society for Conservation Biology.

Human factors more than ecology dictate conservation opportunity and the subsequent success of implementation. This is particularly true in places such as the Solomon Islands where most terrestrial and coastal marine areas remain in community ownership. However, factors such as community support are not reliably predictable, nor easy to map, and therefore challenging to incorporate into systematic conservation plans. Here, we describe how the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities and The Nature Conservancy have worked with the communities of Choiseul Province, Solomon Islands, to develop a conservation planning process that reconciles community-driven conservation opportunities, with a systematic and representation-based approach to prioritization. We suggest how sophisticated prioritization software can be used collaboratively in a community setting, to dynamically assess and guide conservation opportunities as they arise; a process of informed opportunism.

Protected areas are an effective tool for reducing biodiversity loss. Current legislation distinguishes various types of marine protected areas, each allowing different levels of resource extraction. However, almost all of the theory for spatial conservation planning is focused on identifying no-take reserves. The current approaches to zoning for multiple types of protected areas could result in suboptimal plans in terms of protecting biodiversity and minimizing negative socioeconomic impacts. We overcame these limitations in the first application of the multizone planning tool, Marxan with Zones, to design a network of four types of protected areas in the context of California's Marine Life Protection Act. We have produced a zoning configuration that entails mean value losses of less than 9% for every fishery, without compromising conservation goals. We also found that a spatial numerical optimization tool that allows for multiple zones outperforms a tool that can identify one zone (ie marine reserves) in two ways: first, the overall impact on the fishing industry is reduced, and second, a more equitable impact on different fishing sectors is achieved. Finally, we examined the tradeoffs between representing biodiversity features and impacting fisheries. Our approach is applicable to both marine and terrestrial conservation planning, and delivers an ecosystem-based management outcome that balances conservation and industry objectives.

Indices for site prioritization are widely used to address the question: which sites are most important for conservation of biodiversity? We investigate the theoretical underpinnings of target-based prioritization, which measures sites’ contribution to achieving predetermined conservation targets. We show a strong connection between site prioritization and the mathematical theory of voting power. Current site prioritization indices are afflicted by well-known paradoxes of voting power: a site can have zero priority despite having non-zero habitat (the paradox of dummies) and discovery of habitat in a new site can raise the priority of existing sites (the paradox of new members). These paradoxes arise because of the razor’s edge nature of voting, and therefore we seek a new index that is not strictly based on voting. By negating such paradoxes, we develop a set of intuitive axioms that an index should obey. We introduce a simple new index, “fraction-of-spare,” that satisfies all the axioms. For single-species site prioritization, the fraction-of-spare(s) of a site s equals zero if s has no habitat for the species and one if s is essential for meeting the target area for the species. In-between those limits it is linearly interpolated, and equals area(s)/(total area – target). In an evaluation involving multi-year scheduling of site acquisitions for conservation of forest types in New South Wales under specified clearing rates, fraction-of-spare outperforms 58 existing prioritization indices. We also compute the optimal schedule of acquisitions for each of three evaluation measures (under the assumed clearing rates) using integer programming, which indicates that there is still potential for improvement in site prioritization for conservation scheduling.

Real patterns of ecological connectivity are seldom explicitly or systematically accounted for systematic conservation planning, in part because commonly used decision support systems can only capture simplistic notions of connectivity. Conventionally, the surrogates used to represent connectivity in conservation plans have assumed the connection between two sites to be symmetric in strength. In reality, ecological linkages between sites are rarely symmetric and often strongly asymmetric. Here, we develop a novel formulation that enabled us to incorporate asymmetric connectivity into the conservation decision support system Marxan. We illustrate this approach using hypothetical examples of a river catchment and a group of reefs, and then apply it to case studies in the Snowy River catchment and Great Barrier Reef, Australia. We show that incorporating asymmetric ecological connectivity in systematic reserve design leads to solutions that more effectively capture connectivity patterns, relative to either ignoring connectivity or assuming symmetric connectivity.

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.

Marxan is the most widely used conservation planning software in the world and is designed for solving complex conservation planning problems in landscapes and seascapes. In this paper we describe a substantial extension of Marxan called Marxan with Zones, a decision support tool that provides land-use zoning options in geographical regions for biodiversity conservation. We describe new functions designed to enhance the original Marxan software and expand on its utility as a decision support tool. The major new element in the decision problem is allowing any parcel of land or sea to be allocated to a specific zone, not just reserved or unreserved. Each zone then has the option of its own actions, objectives and constraints, with the flexibility to define the contribution of each zone to achieve targets for pre-specified features (e.g. species or habitats). The objective is to minimize the total cost of implementing the zoning plan while ensuring a variety of conservation and land-use objectives are achieved. We outline the capabilities, limitations and additional data requirements of this new software and perform a comparison with the original version of Marxan. We feature a number of case studies to demonstrate the functionality of the software and highlight its flexibility to address a range of complex spatial planning problems. These studies demonstrate the design of multiple-use marine parks in both Western Australia and California, and the zoning of forest use in East Kalimantan.

There is considerable discussion about the relative importance of conserving high quality wilderness areas (i.e. large and intact landscapes) versus conserving areas with high biodiversity values. Places that are needed to achieve one aspect of biodiversity conservation are not necessarily optimal for another which can lead to conflict in assigning conservation priorities. However, both are important for biodiversity conservation, and carry social, economic, and ecological values. Investment in both (a) representation of elements of biodiversity (e.g. species, habitats) and (b) wilderness conservation is not only complementary but important for the long-term persistence of biodiversity. We develop two approaches to identify areas important for the conservation of biodiversity in terms of both wilderness quality and biodiversity representation, using Australia as a case study. We defined intact areas as sub-catchments with at least 70% or more vegetation that has not been subjected to extensive habitat loss and fragmentation as the result of land clearing. The first approach aims to achieve biodiversity representation goals in areas with intact native vegetation. The results of this approach would be extremely expensive to implement as they require a large portion of land. The second approach aims to achieve biodiversity representation goals anywhere across the landscape while placing a strong emphasis on identifying spatially compact intact areas. The results of this approach show the trade-offs between the economic costs of conservation and the size of conservation areas containing intact native vegetation. This manuscript provides a novel framework for identifying cost-effective biodiversity conservation priorities inclusive of wilderness quality.

Systematic conservation planning research has focused on designing systems of conservation areas that efficiently protect a comprehensive and representative set of species and habitats. Recently, there has been an emphasis on improving the adequacy of conservation area design to promote the persistence and future generation of biodiversity. Few studies have explored incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes into conservation planning assessments. Biodiversity in Australia is maintained and generated by numerous ecological and evolutionary processes at various spatial and temporal scales. We accommodated ecological and evolutionary processes in four ways: (1) using sub-catchments as planning units to facilitate the protection of the integrity and function of ecosystem processes occurring on a sub-catchment scale; (2) targeting one type of ecological refugia, drought refugia, which are critical for the persistence of many species during widespread drought; (3) targeting one type of evolutionary refugia which are important for maintaining and generating unique biota during long-term climatic changes; and (4) preferentially grouping priority areas along vegetated waterways to account for the importance of connected waterways and associated riparian areas in maintaining processes. We identified drought refugia, areas of relatively high and regular herbage production in arid and semiarid Australia, from estimates of gross primary productivity derived from satellite data. In this paper, we combined the novel incorporation of these processes with a more traditional framework of efficiently representing a comprehensive sample of biodiversity to identify spatial priorities across Australia. We explored the trade-offs between economic costs, representation targets, and connectivity. Priority areas that considered ecological and evolutionary processes were more connected along vegetated waterways and were identified for a small increase in economic cost. Priority areas for conservation investment are more likely to have long-term benefits to biodiversity if ecological and evolutionary processes are considered in their identification.

Large-scale catastrophic events, although rare, lie generally beyond the control of local management and can prevent marine reserves from achieving biodiversity outcomes. We formulate a new conservation planning problem that aims to minimize the probability of missing conservation targets as a result of catastrophic events. To illustrate this approach we formulate and solve the problem of minimizing the impact of large-scale coral bleaching events on a reserve system for the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. We show that by considering the threat of catastrophic events as part of the reserve design problem it is possible to substantially improve the likely persistence of conservation features within reserve networks for a negligible increase in cost. In the case of the Great Barrier Reef, a 2% increase in overall reserve cost was enough to improve the long-run performance of our reserve network by >60%. Our results also demonstrate that simply aiming to protect the reefs at lowest risk of catastrophic bleaching does not necessarily lead to the best conservation outcomes, and enormous gains in overall persistence can be made by removing the requirement to represent all bioregions in the reserve network. We provide an explicit and well-defined method that allows the probability of catastrophic disturbances to be included in the site selection problem without creating additional conservation targets or imposing arbitrary presence/absence thresholds on existing data. This research has implications for reserve design in a changing climate.

The presence and movements of organisms both reflect and influence the distribution of ecological resources in space and time. The monitoring of animal movement by telemetry devices is being increasingly used to inform management of marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. Here, we brought together academics, and environmental managers to determine the extent of animal movement research in the Australasian region, and assess the opportunities and challenges in the sharing and reuse of these data. This working group was formed under the Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (ACEAS), whose overall aim was to facilitate trans-organisational and transdisciplinary synthesis. We discovered that between 2000 and 2012 at least 501 peer-reviewed scientific papers were published that report animal location data collected by telemetry devices from within the Australasian region. Collectively, this involved the capture and electronic tagging of 12 656 animals. The majority of studies were undertaken to address specific management questions; rarely were these data used beyond their original intent. We estimate that approximately half (~ 500) of all animal telemetry projects undertaken remained unpublished, a similar proportion were not discoverable via online resources, and less than 8.8% of all animals tagged and tracked had their data stored in a discoverable and accessible manner. Animal telemetry data contain a wealth of information about how animals and species interact with each other and the landscapes they inhabit. These data are expensive and difficult to collect and can reduce survivorship of the tagged individuals, which implies an ethical obligation to make the data available to the scientific community. This is the first study to quantify the gap between telemetry devices placed on animals and findings/data published, and presents methods for improvement. Instigation of these strategies will enhance the cost-effectiveness of the research and maximise its impact on the management of natural resources. Fil: Campbell, Hamish A.. University of New England; Australia Fil: Beyer, Hawthorne L. . University Of Queensland; Australia Fil: Dennis, Todd E.. The University Of Auckland; Nueva Zelanda Fil: Dwyer, Ross G. . University Of Queensland; Australia Fil: Forester, James D.. University Of Minnesota; Estados Unidos Fil: Fukuda, Yusuke . Department of Land Resource Management; Australia Fil: Lynch, Catherine . Arid Recovery; Australia Fil: Hindell, Mark A. . University Of Tasmania; Australia Fil: Menke, Norbert . Queensland Department of Science, Information, Technology, Innovation and the Arts; Australia Fil: Morales, Juan Manuel. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universitario Bariloche. Laboratorio de Ecotono; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; Argentina Fil: Richardson, Craig . Department of the Environment; Australia Fil: Rodgers, Essie. University Of Queensland; Australia Fil: Taylor, Graeme . Department of Conservation; Nueva Zelanda Fil: Watts, Matt E. . University Of Queensland; Australia Fil: Westcott, David A.. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; Australia

We used two measures to compare the effectiveness of 52 conservation criteria in achieving conservation targets for forest types. The first measure was efficiency. Although widely used, efficiency assumes no loss or reduction of biodiversity features before conservation is implemented. This is invalid in many situations. Often, it is more realistic to assume gradual implementation accompanied by incremental, predictable reduction and loss of biodiversity features. We simulated future landscapes resulting from the annual interplay of loss and conservation of forest types. We then based our second measure, retention, on how well criteria scheduled conservation action to prevent targets being compromised. The simulations partly support predictions about the best criteria for scheduling implementation with continuing biodiversity loss. Retention was weakly related or unrelated to efficiency across 52 criteria. Although retention values were sensitive to changes in targets and rates of conservation and forest loss, one criterion consistently produced highest retention values.

We applied six measures of effectiveness to recent decisions about additional conservation areas in north-eastern New South Wales. Three have been widely used previously: (1) number of conservation areas; (2) total extent of conservation areas; and (3) representativeness (the proportion of natural features such as forest types or animal species represented in conservation areas to some targeted level). The other measures were: (4) efficiency or representation bias (the extent to which some features are protected above target levels at the expense of others that remain poorly protected); (5) relative protection of vulnerable areas within public land (percentage protection of flat, fertile areas relative to that of steep and/or infertile areas); and (6) relative protection of vulnerable areas across all tenures (the correlation between the amount of protection given to features and their vulnerabilities to clearing). We applied the measures in two chronological comparisons: the reserve system in 1994, 1996 and 1997; and before and after the Interim Assessment Process of 1996 which involved negotiations over new reserves and extensive unreserved areas that were temporarily deferred from logging. Over the study period, despite expansion of formal conservation and progress towards quantitative conservation targets, gazetted reserves remained strongly biased to the steep and/or infertile parts of public lands. Both gazetted reserves and areas deferred from logging increased the bias in protection away from forest types most vulnerable to clearing and for which regional conservation targets had already been most compromised. Two major challenges for future conservation decisions in the region are common to conservation planning generally: (1) to focus protection within public tenure on habitats and species most vulnerable to threatening processes such as logging; and (2) to provide more effective conservation management on private lands where loss of native vegetation continues.

Conservation in human-dominated landscapes is challenging partly due to the high costs of land acquisition. We explored a property tax mechanism to finance conservation easements or related contracts as a partial-property acquisition strategy to meet Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) treaty targets to conserve critically imperiled coastal Douglas fir ecosystems in Canada. To maximize cost-efficiency, we used systematic planning tools to prioritize 198,058 parcels for biodiversity values, estimated the cost of eliminating property tax on high-priority parcels to engage land owners in conservation, and then calculated the tax increase on nonpriority parcels necessary to maintain tax revenue. Marginal tax rate increases of 0.13, 0.21, and 0.51% on nonpriority parcels were necessary to offset the elimination of tax revenue on ∼21,000 ha of high-priority parcels, and potentially sufficient to increase area protection from 9% to 17% to meet CBD targets given uptake rates of 100, 50, or 25%, respectively. Sensitivity analyses suggest uptake rates of 30% to 40% could allow government to achieve a 17% target with 30% of the planning area prioritized for inclusion in a property tax mechanism. Our results suggest prioritizing parcels for biodiversity value and commensurate “tax shifting” may offer an efficient route to conservation on private land.

The aim of the OzTrack project is to provide common e-Science infrastructure to support the management, pre-processing, analysis and visualization of animal tracking data generated by researchers who are using telemetry devices to study animal behavior and ecology in Australia. This paper describes the technical challenges and design decisions associated with the development of the OzTrack system. It also describes the pre-processing, analysis and visualization services that we have developed to help researchers understand how their study species move across space and time. Finally this paper outlines the systems' current limitations and preliminary results and feedback from its evaluation to date.

We present a novel method for designing marine reserves that trades off three important attributes of a conservation plan: habitat condition, habitat representation, and socioeconomic costs. We calculated habitat condition in four ways, using different human impacts as a proxy for condition: all impacts; impacts that cannot be managed with a reserve; land-based impacts; and climate change impacts. We demonstrate our approach in California, where three important tradeoffs emerged. First, reserve systems that have a high chance of protecting good condition habitats cost fishers less than 3.1% of their income. Second, cost to fishers can be reduced by 1/2-2/3 by triaging less than 1/3 of habitats. Finally, increasing the probability of protecting good condition habitats from 50% to 99% costs fishers an additional 1.7% of their income, with roughly 0.3% added costs for each additional 10% confidence. Knowing exactly what the cost of these tradeoffs are informs discussion and potential compromise among stakeholders involved in protected area planning worldwide.

Alternative land uses make different contributions to the conservation of biodiversity and have different implementation and management costs. Conservation planning analyses to date have generally assumed that land is either protected or unprotected, and that the unprotected portion does not contribute to conservation goals. We develop and apply a new planning approach that explicitly accounts for the contribution of a diverse range of land uses to achieving conservation goals. Using East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case study, we prioritize investments in alternative conservation strategies and account for the relative contribution of land uses ranging from production forest to well-managed protected areas. We employ data on the distribution of mammals and assign species-specific conservation targets to achieve equitable protection by accounting for life history characteristics and home range sizes. The relative sensitivity of each species to forest degradation determines the contribution of each land use to achieving targets. We compare the cost effectiveness of our approach to a plan that considers only the contribution of protected areas to biodiversity conservation, and to a plan that assumes that the cost of conservation is represented by only the opportunity costs of conservation to the timber industry. Our preliminary results will require further development and substantial stakeholder engagement prior to implementation; nonetheless we reveal that, by accounting for the contribution of unprotected land, we can obtain more refined estimates of the costs of conservation. Using traditional planning approaches would overestimate the cost of achieving the conservation targets by an order of magnitude. Our approach reveals not only where to invest, but which strategies to invest in, in order to effectively and efficiently conserve biodiversity.

1. The estuarine crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) is the world's largest living reptile. It predominately inhabits freshwater and estuarine habitats, but widespread geographic distribution throughout oceanic islands of the South-east Pacific suggests that individuals undertake sizeable ocean voyages. 2. Here we show that adult C. porosus adopt behavioural strategies to utilise surface water currents during long-distance travel, enabling them to move quickly and efficiently over considerable distances. 3. We used acoustic telemetry to monitor crocodile movement throughout 63 km of river, and found that when individuals engaged in a long-distance, constant direction journey (10 km day(-1)), they would only travel when current flow direction was favourable. Depth and temperature measurements from implanted transmitters showed that they remained at the water surface during travel but would dive to the river substratum or climb out on the river bank if current flow direction became unfavourable. 4. Satellite positional fixes from tagged crocodiles engaged in ocean travel were overlaid with residual surface current (RSC) estimates. The data showed a strong correlation existed between the bearing of the RSC and that of the travelling crocodile (r(2) = 0.92, P0.0001). 5. The study demonstrates that C. porosus dramatically increase their travel potential by riding surface currents, providing an effective dispersal strategy for this species.

Conservation planning is the process of locating, configuring, implementing and maintaining areas that are managed to promote the persistence of biodiversity and other natural values. Conservation planning is inherently spatial. The science behind it has solved important spatial problems and increasingly influenced practice. To be effective, however, conservation planning must deal better with two types of change. First, biodiversity is not static in time or space but generated and maintained by natural processes. Second, humans are altering the planet in diverse ways at ever faster rates.

The Fifth World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, announced in September 2003 that the global network of protected areas now covers 11.5% of the planet's land surface. This surpasses the 10% target proposed a decade earlier, at the Caracas Congress, for 9 out of 14 major terrestrial biomes. Such uniform targets based on percentage of area have become deeply embedded into national and international conservation planning. Although politically expedient, the scientific basis and conservation value of these targets have been questioned. In practice, however, little is known of how to set appropriate targets, or of the extent to which the current global protected area network fulfils its goal of protecting biodiversity. Here, we combine five global data sets on the distribution of species and protected areas to provide the first global gap analysis assessing the effectiveness of protected areas in representing species diversity. We show that the global network is far from complete, and demonstrate the inadequacy of uniform--that is, 'one size fits all'--conservation targets.

Protected areas are the single most important conservation tool. The global protected-area network has grown substantially in recent decades, now occupying 11.5% of Earth's land surface, but such growth has not been strategically aimed at maximizing the coverage of global biodiversity. In a previous study, we demonstrated that the global network is far from complete, even for the representation of terrestrial vertebrate species. Here we present a first attempt to provide a global framework for the next step of strategically expanding the network to cover mammals, amphibians, freshwater turtles and tortoises, and globally threatened birds. We identify unprotected areas of the world that have remarkably high conservation value (irreplaceability) and are under serious threat. These areas concentrate overwhelmingly in tropical and subtropical moist forests, particularly on tropical mountains and islands. The expansion of the global protected-area network in these regions is urgently needed to prevent the loss of unique biodiversity.

The tagging of aquatic and semi-aquatic animals with acoustic transmitters and their detection by passive underwater receivers has gained huge popularity over the past decade. This technology offers researchers the opportunity to monitor the finite- to broad-scale movements of multiple individuals over many years; however, the sheer scale and spatial complexity of these datasets are often beyond the capabilities of routine database and spread-sheet applications. In thepresentpaper,wedescribesoftware(V-Track)thatgreatlyfacilitatestheassimilation,analysisandsynthesisofanimal- location data collected by underwater passive acoustic receivers. The principal features within V-Track are the behavioural event qualifier (BEQ) and the receiver-distance matrix (RDM) calculator. The BEQ identifies and catalogues horizontal movements from receiver detection data, or vertical movements from transmitter sensor data (depth or temperature). The RDMis generatedfrom thegeographicallocationof the acousticreceivers andis utilisedbyV-Trackto illustrate the behavioural event information in a spatial context. V-Track is a package written within the R-programming language, and a graphical user interface is also provided. Here, we feature two case studies to demonstrate software functionality for defining and quantifying behaviour in acoustically tagged marine and freshwater vertebrates. Additional keywords: behaviour, R, tracking VEMCO, VR2W.

Patterns of movement in aquatic animals reflect ecologically important behaviours. Cyclical changes in the abiotic environment influence these movements, but when multiple processes occur simultaneously, identifying which is responsible for the observed movement can be complex. Here we used acoustic telemetry and signal processing to define the abiotic processes responsible for movement patterns in freshwater whiprays (Himantura dalyensis). Acoustic transmitters were implanted into the whiprays and their movements detected over 12 months by an array of passive acoustic receivers, deployed throughout 64 km of the Wenlock River, Qld, Australia. The time of an individual’s arrival and departure from each receiver detection field was used to estimate whipray location continuously throughout the study. This created a linear-movement-waveform for each whipray and signal processing revealed periodic components within the waveform. Correlation of movement periodograms with those from abiotic processes categorically illustrated that the diel cycle dominated the pattern of whipray movement during the wet season, whereas tidal and lunar cycles dominated during the dry season. The study methodology represents a valuable tool for objectively defining the relationship between abiotic processes and the movement patterns of free-ranging aquatic animals and is particularly expedient when periods of no detection exist within the animal location data.

Acrochordus arafurae is a fully aquatic, freshwater snake distributed throughout tropical Australia. To better understand the ecological factors influencing their behavioural repertoire, we remotely monitored field body temperature and diving in snakes free-ranging within their natural habitat. The body temperatures of A. arafurae exhibited a diel profile similar to the surface water temperature, and reflected the high proportion of time that snakes remained 6 m), and there was a positive correlation between dive depth and duration. Average dive duration was 6.6 min and 84% of dives were terminated within 10 min, but all snakes performed dives >50 min during the 14-day observation period. We hypothesise that the dive behaviour was strongly influenced by predation pressure. The snakes partake in short dives within the aerobic dive limit to reduce the amount of time they need to spend at the surface on each breathing bout, reducing the risk of predation by birds. Predation is a strong selective force that might alter the time allocation during dive cycles.

Background The typical mandate in conservation planning is to identify areas that represent biodiversity targets within the smallest possible area of land or sea, despite the fact that area may be a poor surrogate for the cost of many conservation actions. It is also common for priorities for conservation investment to be identified without regard to the particular conservation action that will be implemented. This demonstrates inadequate problem specification and may lead to inefficiency: the cost of alternative conservation actions can differ throughout a landscape, and may result in dissimilar conservation priorities. Methodology/Principal Findings We investigate the importance of formulating conservation planning problems with objectives and cost data that relate to specific conservation actions. We identify priority areas in Australia for two alternative conservation actions: land acquisition and stewardship. Our analyses show that using the cost surrogate that most closely reflects the planned conservation action can cut the cost of achieving our biodiversity goals by half. We highlight spatial differences in relative priorities for land acquisition and stewardship in Australia, and provide a simple approach for determining which action should be undertaken where. Conclusions/Significance Our study shows that a poorly posed conservation problem that fails to pre-specify the planned conservation action and incorporate cost a priori can lead to expensive mistakes. We can be more efficient in achieving conservation goals by clearly specifying our conservation objective and parameterising the problem with economic data that reflects this objective.

Improvements in telemetry technology are allowing us to monitor animal movements with increasing accuracy, precision and frequency. The increased complexity of the data collections, however, demands additional software and programming skills to process, store and disseminate the datasets. Recent focus on data availability has also heightened the need for sustainable data management solutions to ensure data integrity and provide longer term access. In the last ten years, a number of online facilities have been developed for the archiving, processing and sharing of telemetry data. These facilities offer secure storage, multi-user support and analysis tools and are a step along the way to improving data access, long-term data preservation and science communication. While these software platforms promote data sharing, access to the majority of the data and to the software behind these systems remains restricted. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, highly accessible and fully transparent software facility for animal movement data. The online system we developed ( http://oztrack.org ) offers a set of robust, up-to-date and accessible tools for managing, processing, visualising and analysing animal location data and linking these outputs with environmental datasets. As OzTrack uses exclusively free and open-source software, and the source code is available online, the system promotes open access not only to data but also to the tools and software underpinning the system. We outline the capabilities and limitations of the infrastructure design and discuss the uptake of this platform by the Australasian biotelemetry community. We discuss whether an open approach to analysis tools and software encourages a more open approach to sharing data, information and knowledge. Finally, we discuss why a free and open approach enhances longer term sustainability and enables data storage facilities to evolve in parallel with the telemetry devices themselves.