Aligning data with decisions to address the biodiversity crisis.

The planetary outlook for biodiversity is dire. A new collection of articles discusses the disconnect between the data we have and the data we need for more effective action on conservation, as well as how social justice and end-user viewpoints must be centered to ensure a more sustainable future for our planet.

Prioritizing resource allocation to reduce adverse effects of pesticide risk for endangered species.

The use of pesticides promotes food security because of the multiple benefits it brings to agriculture, such as reduction in crop losses. However, the use of pesticides can be potentially harmful to non-target species. In the U.

Attributes of preemptive conservation efforts for species precluded from listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Preemptive conservation efforts to reduce threats have been credited with precluding the need to list some imperiled species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Factors associated with preemptive conservation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

In recent decades, there has been an increasing emphasis on proactive efforts to conserve species being considered for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) before they are listed (i.

Private land conservation decision-making: An integrative social science model.

Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding.

Space use and habitat selection of an invasive mesopredator and sympatric, native apex predator.

Background: Where mesopredators co-exist with dominant apex predators, an understanding of the factors that influence their habitat and space use can provide insights that help guide wildlife conservation and pest management actions. A predator's habitat use is defined by its home range, which is influenced by its selection or avoidance of habitat features and intra- and inter-specific interactions within the landscape. These are driven by both innate and learned behaviour, operating at different spatial scales.

Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation.

Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the potential benefits of conservation interventions, but explicit quantification of the financial costs of implementation is rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means published values are difficult to interpret.

Factoring economic costs into conservation planning may not improve agreement over priorities for protection.

Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods.

Waiting can be an optimal conservation strategy, even in a crisis discipline.

Biodiversity conservation projects confront immediate and escalating threats with limited funding. Conservation theory suggests that the best response to the species extinction crisis is to spend money as soon as it becomes available, and this is often an explicit constraint placed on funding. We use a general dynamic model of a conservation landscape to show that this decision to "front-load" project spending can be suboptimal if a delay allows managers to use resources more strategically.

Limitations of outsourcing on-the-ground biodiversity conservation.

To counteract global species decline, modern biodiversity conservation engages in large projects, spends billions of dollars, and includes many organizations working simultaneously within regions. To add to this complexity, the conservation sector has hierarchical structure, where conservation actions are often outsourced by funders (foundations, government, etc.) to local organizations that work on-the-ground.

Experimental test for facilitation of seedling recruitment by the dominant bunchgrass in a fire-maintained savanna.

Facilitative interactions between neighboring plants can influence community composition, especially in locations where environmental stress is a factor limiting competitive effects. The longleaf pine savanna of the southeastern United States is a threatened and diverse system where seedling recruitment success and understory species richness levels are regulated by the availability of moist microsites. We hypothesized that the dominant bunch grass species (Aristida stricta Michx.

Effects of resource availability on seedling recruitment in a fire-maintained savanna.

The herbaceous ground cover of the longleaf pine ecosystem harbors the highest plant species richness in North America, with up to 50 species per square meter, but the mechanisms that regulate this diversity are not well understood. In this system, variability in seedling recruitment events may best explain the extremely high small-scale species richness and its relationship to soil moisture and system net primary productivity. To understand the potential mechanistic controls on species richness, we used a long-term resource manipulation study across a natural soil moisture gradient to assess environmental controls on seedling recruitment.