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Spatial optimization approaches that were originally developed to help conservation organizations determine protection decisions over small spatial scales are now used to inform global or continental scale priority setting. However, the different decision contexts involved in large‐scale resource allocation need to be considered. We present a continuous optimization approach in which a decision‐maker allocates funding to regional offices. Local decision‐makers then use these funds to implement habitat protection efforts with varying effectiveness when evaluated in terms of the funder's goals. We illustrate this continuous formulation by examining the relative priority that should be given to different counties in the coterminous United States when acquiring land to establish new protected areas. If weighting all species equally, counties in the southwest United States, where large areas can be bought cheaply, are priorities for protection. If focusing only on species of conservation concern, priorities shift to locations rich in such species, particularly near expanding exurban areas facing high rates of future habitat conversion (e.g., south‐central Texas). Priorities for protection are sensitive to what is assumed about local ecological and decision‐making processes. For example, decision‐makers who doubt the efficacy of local land protection efforts should focus on a few key areas, while optimistic decision‐makers should disperse funding more widely. Efforts to inform large‐scale conservation priorities should reflect better the types of choice that decision‐makers actually face when working over these scales. They also need to report the sensitivity of recommended priorities to what are often unstated assumptions about local processes affecting conservation outcomes.

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and outcomes. There are 4 barriers—ideological, institutional, knowledge, and capacity—to meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation. We provide practical guidance on overcoming these barriers to mainstream the social sciences in conservation science, practice, and policy. Broadly, we recommend fostering knowledge on the scope and contributions of the social sciences to conservation, including social scientists from the inception of interdisciplinary research projects, incorporating social science research and insights during all stages of conservation planning and implementation, building social science capacity at all scales in conservation organizations and agencies, and promoting engagement with the social sciences in and through global conservation policy-influencing organizations. Conservation social scientists, too, need to be willing to engage with natural science knowledge and to communicate insights and recommendations clearly. We urge the conservation community to move beyond superficial engagement with the conservation social sciences. A more inclusive and integrative conservation science—one that includes the natural and social sciences—will enable more ecologically effective and socially just conservation. Better collaboration among social scientists, natural scientists, practitioners, and policy makers will facilitate a renewed and more robust conservation. Mainstreaming the conservation social sciences willfacilitate the uptake of the full range of insights and contributions from these fields into conservation policy and practice. A pesar del reconocimiento general del valor de las ciencias sociales y los crecientes llamados por un mejor compromiso con el elemento humano de la conservación, las ciencias sociales de la conservación siguen siendo malentendidas y poco utilizadas en la práctica. Las ciencias sociales de la conservación pueden proporcionar contribuciones únicas e importantes para el entendimiento de la sociedad de las relaciones entre los humanos y la naturaleza y para la mejora de las prácticas de la conservación y sus resultados. Existen cuatro barreras - ideológicas, institucionales, de conocimiento y de capacidad - para la integración significativa de las ciencias sociales dentro de la conservación. Proporcionamos una guia práctica sobre cómo sobreponerse a estas barreras paraJncorporar la perspectiva de las ciencias sociales a la ciencia, las prácticas y las políticas de conservación. En general, recomendamos promover el conocimiento sobre el alcance y las contribuciones de las ciencias sociales para la conservación, incluir a los científicos sociales desde el origen de los proyectos de investigación interdisciplinaria, incorporar la investigación de las ciencias sociales y las percepciones durante todas las fases de la planificación y la implementación de la conservación, construir la capacidad de las ciencias sociales en todas las escalas de las organizaciones y agencias de conservación y promover el compromiso con las ciencias sociales en y a través de organizaciones de conservación con influencia política. Los científicos sociales de la conservación, también, necesitan estar dispuestos a involucrarse con el conocimiento de las ciencias naturales y a comunicar percepciones y recomendaciones de manera clara. Le urgimos a la comunidad de la conservación que vaya más allá del compromiso superficial con las ciencias sociales de la conservación. Una ciencia de la conservación más incluyente y integradora - una que incluya a las ciencias sociales y naturales - permitirá una conservación más justa socialmente y más efectiva ecológicamente. Una mejor colaboración entre los científicos sociales, los científicos naturales, los practicantes y quienes elaboran las políticas facilitará una conservación más renovada y más sólida. Incorporar la perspectiva de las ciencias sociales de la conservación facilitará la absorción de la extensión completa de conocimiento y contribuciones de estos campos a la práctica y las políticas de la conservación.

Changes in the perception and goals of nature conservation require a solid scientific basis Conservation biology is a mission-driven discipline ( 1 ) and is therefore subject to both drift and the periodic adoption of fads and fashions ( 2 ). Although many basic conservation principles, conservation organizations, and initiatives of global reach and impact have persisted almost unchanged for decades, the framing and purpose of conservation have shifted ( 3 ). These shifts mainly relate to how the relationships between people and nature are viewed, with consequences for the science underpinning conservation.

Plant conservation initiatives lag behind and receive considerably less funding than animal conservation projects. We explored a potential reason for this bias: a tendency among humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environment. Experimental research and surveys have demonstrated higher preference for, superior recall of and better visual detection of animals compared with plants. This bias has been attributed to perceptual factors such as lack of motion by plants and the tendency of plants to visually blend together but also to cultural factors such as a greater focus on animals informal biological education. In contrast, ethnographic research reveals that many social groups have strong bonds with plants, including nonhierarchical kinship relationships. We argue that plant blindness is common, but not inevitable. If immersed in a plant-affiliated culture, the individual will experience language and practices that enhance capacity to detect, recall, and value plants, something less likely to occur in zoocentric societies. Therefore, conservation programs can contribute to reducing this bias. We considered strategies that might reduce this bias and encourage plant conservation behavior. Psychological research demonstrates that people are more likely to support conservation of species that have human-like characteristics and that support for conservation can be increased by encouraging people to practice empathy and anthropomorphism ofnonhuman species. We argue that support for plant conservation may be garnered through strategies that promote identification and empathy with plants. Las iniciativas de conservación de plantas se quedan atrás y reciben considerablemente menos financiamiento que los proyectos de conservación de animales. Exploramos una posible razón de esta preferencia: una tendencia entre los humanos a no tomar en cuenta ni valorar a las plantas en el ambiente. La investigación experimental y los censos han demostrado una mayor preferencia por, una memoria superior por y una mejor detección visual de los animales en comparación con las plantas. Este sesgo se ha atribuido a factores de percepción como la falta de movimiento de las plantas y la tendencia de las plantas a combinarse entre sí, pero también se atribuye a factores culturales como un mayor enfoque sobre los animales en la educación biológica formal. En contraste, la investigación etnográfica revela que muchos grupos sociales tienen lazos fuertes con las plantas, incluyendo relaciones no-jerárquicas de parentesco. Argumentamos que ignorar a las plantas es común, pero no es inevitable. Si se está inmerso en una cultura afiliada con las plantas, el individuo vivirá lenguajes y prácticas que incrementan la capacidad de detectar, recordar y valorar a las plantas, algo menos probable de ocurrir en las sociedades zoocéntricas. Por esto, los programas de conservación pueden contribuir a reducir este sesgo. Consideramos estrategias que podrían reducir este sesgo y fomentar el comportamiento de conservación de plantas. La investigación psicológica demuestra que las personas tienen mayor probabilidad de apoyar a la conservación de las especies que tienen características humanas y que el apoyo hacia la conservación puede incrementarse si se alienta a las personas a practicar la empatia y el antropomorfismo de especies -humanas. Argumentamos que el apoyo para la conservación de las plantas puede obtenerse por medio de estrategias que promuevan la identificación con y la empatia hacia las plantas.

Conservation interventions require evaluation to understand what factors predict success or failure. To date, there has been little systematic investigation of the effect of social and cultural context on conservation success, although a large body of literature argues it is important. We investigated whether local cultural context, particularly local institutions and the efforts of interventions to engage with this culture significantly influence conservation outcomes. We also tested the effects of community participation, conservation education, benefit provision, and market integration. We systematically reviewed the literature on community-based conservation and identified 68 interventions suitable for inclusion. We used a protocol to extract and code information and evaluated a range of measures of outcome success (attitudinal, behavioral, ecological, and economic). We also examined the association of each predictor with each outcome measure and the structure of predictor covariance. Local institutional context influenced intervention outcomes, and interventions that engaged with local institutions were more likely to succeed. Nevertheless, there was limited support for the role of community participation, conservation education, benefit provision, and market integration on intervention success. We recommend that conservation interventions seek to understand the societies they work with and tailor their activities accordingly. Systematic reviews are a valuable approach for assessing conservation evidence, although sensitive to the continuing lack of high-quality reporting on conservation interventions.

While biodiversity conservation has had a longstanding relationship with markets, the recent past has seen a proliferation of novel market-based instruments in conservation such as payments for ecosystem services. Whilst a number of conservation organisations have aligned themselves with this ‘neoliberal’ shift, relatively few studies interrogate the extent to which this move resonates with the values held by conservation professionals. An earlier study of the views of conservationists participating in the 2011 Society for Conservation Biology conference found both supportive and critical perspectives on the use of markets in conservation (Sandbrook et al. 2013b). This paper investigates the consistency of the perspectives identified in the earlier study by applying the same Q methodology survey to a group of Cambridge, UK-based conservationists. While both studies reveal supporting and more sceptical perspectives on the use of markets in conservation, the pro-market perspective in each sample is nearly identical. This finding provides empirical confirmation of a growing body of research that suggests that a relatively consistent set of pro-market perspectives have permeated the thinking of decision makers and staff of conservation organisations. It also lends some support to the suggestion that a transnational conservation elite may be driving this uptake of market approaches.

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. This reporting deficiency hinders progress toward a collective understanding of the financial costs of management interventions across projects and thus limits the ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We devised a standardized approach to describing financial costs reported for conservation interventions. The standards call for researchers and practitioners to describe the objective and outcome, context and methods, and scale of costed interventions, and to state which categories of costs are included and the currency and date for reported costs. These standards aim to provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the cost data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals so that cost reporting is comparable among studies. This would support shared learning and enhance the ability to identify and perform cost-effective conservation. Las intervenciones efectivas de manejo para la conservación deben combatir amenazas y proporcionar beneficios con costos que se pueden obtener con presupuestos limitados. Se han enfocado esfuerzos considerables para medir los beneficios potenciales de las intervenciones de conservación, pero es rara la cuantificación explícita de los costos financieros de la implementación. Aun cuando se han cuantificado los costos, los informes aleatorios e inconsistentes significa que los valores publicados son difíciles de entender. Esta deficiencia en los informes limita el progreso hacia un entendimiento colectivo de los costos financieros de las intervenciones de manejo y por lo tanto limita la habilidad de identificar soluciones eficientes a los problemas de conservación o de atraer financiamiento adecuado. Diseñamos un método estandarizado para describir los costos financieros reportados para las intervenciones para la conservación. Los estándares requieren que los investigadores y practicantes describan el objetivo y resultados, el contexto y los métodos y la escala de las intervenciones presupuestadas y que citen las categorías de costos incluidas y la divisa y fecha de los costos reportados. Estos estándares tratan de proporcionar suficiente información contextual para que los lectores y futuros usuarios puedan interpretar los datos de costos apropiadamente. Sugerimos que estos estándares sean adoptados por las principales organizaciones de conservación, las instituciones científicas y las revistas para que los informes de costos sean comparables entre estudios. Esto daría soporte al aprendizaje compartido y incrementar la habilidad para identificar y realizar conservación rentable. 有效的保护管理干预必须与其所受到的威胁作斗争，并且在有限预算内获得收益。现在有许多工作用于 衡量保护干预的潜在收益，却少有对措施实施的成本进行明确地量化。即使存在这样的量化，这些缺少规划、 前后不一致的分析报告也使得这些量化的结果难以被解释。这类报告的缺陷阻碍了进ー步对跨项目管理干预的 財政成本的综合认识，因此也限制了确定解决保护问题的有效措施和吸引到充足经费的能力。这里,我们册了 一种标准化的方法来描述保护干预的财政成本报告, 这套标准要求研究者和实践者描述目标和结果、背景和方 法、干预的规摸, 并说明包括了哪些类别的成本、报告成本所用的货币及日期。我们提出的标准旨在提供足够 的背景信息，以便读者和将来的使用者可以合理地解读这些成本数据。我们建议重要的保护组织、保护科学机 构和期刊采用这些标准，使得这些成本报告在不同研究中具有可比较性。这还有助于共同学习，提高认识和实施 高效益的保护管理的能力。

Insecure land tenure plagues many developing and tropical regions, often where conservation concerns are highest. Conservation organizations have long focused on protected areas as tenure interventions, but are now thinking more comprehensively about whether and how to incorporate other land tenure strategies into their work, and how to more soundly ground such interventions on evidence of both conservation and human benefits. Through a review of the literature on land tenure security as it relates to conservation practice, predominantly in the tropics, we aim to help conservation practitioners consider and incorporate more appropriate land tenure security interventions into conservation strategies. We present a framework that identifies three common ways in which land tenure security can impact human and conservation outcomes, and suggest practical ways to distill tenure and tenure security issues for a given location. We conclude with steps for considering tenure security issues in the context of conservation projects and identify areas for future research.