Riverine threat indices to assess watershed condition and identify primary management capacity of agriculture natural resource management agencies.

Managers can improve conservation of lotic systems over large geographies if they have tools to assess total watershed conditions for individual stream segments and can identify segments where conservation practices are most likely to be successful (i.e., primary management capacity).

Influence of targets and assessment region size on perceived conservation priorities.

We used an existing conservation opportunity area (OA) data layer for four contiguous ecological subsections within the Ozark Highlands to quantitatively evaluate the influence of conservation targets and assessment region size on conservation priorities. OAs are natural and seminatural land-cover patches that are away from roads and away from patch edges. To evaluate the influence of targets, we assigned a priority score to each OA polygon for each of five different conservation targets, including land-cover patch size, landform representation, target vertebrate richness, target breeding bird richness, and target land cover.