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The allocation of land to biological diversity conservation competes with other land uses and the needs of society for development, food, and extraction of natural resources. Trade-offs between biological diversity conservation and alternative land uses are unavoidable, given the realities of limited conservation resources and the competing demands of society. We developed a conservation-planning assessment for the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, which forms the central component of the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany biological diversity hotspot. Our objective was to enhance biological diversity protection while promoting sustainable development and providing spatial guidance in the resolution of potential policy conflicts over priority areas for conservation at risk of transformation. The conservation-planning assessment combined spatial-distribution models for 646 conservation features, spatial economic-return models for 28 alternative land uses, and spatial maps for 4 threats. Nature-based tourism businesses were competitive with other land uses and could provide revenues of >US$60 million/year to local stakeholders and simultaneously help meeting conservation goals for almost half the conservation features in the planning region. Accounting for opportunity costs substantially decreased conflicts between biological diversity, agricultural use, commercial forestry, and mining. Accounting for economic benefits arising from conservation and reducing potential policy conflicts with alternative plans for development can provide opportunities for successful strategies that combine conservation and sustainable development and facilitate conservation action. La asignación de tierras para la conservación de biodiversidad compite con otros usos de suelo y las necesidades de desarrollo, alimento y extracción de recursos naturales. Los pros y contras de la conservación biológica y de las formas alternativas de uso de suelo son inevitables, en función de la realidad de recursos limitados para la conservación y la competencia de demandas sociales. Desarrollamos una evaluación de la planificación de la conservación para la provincia sudafricana de KwaZulu-Natal, que constituye el componente central del área de importancia para la Conservación Maputaland-Pondonoland-Albany. Nuestro objetivo fue reforzar la protección de la diversidad biológica al tiempo de promover el desarrollo sustentable y proporcionar orientación para la resolución de potenciales conflictos políticos en áreas prioritarias para la conservación que estén en riesgo de transformación. La evaluación de la planificación de la conservación combinó modelos de distribución espacial de 646 atributos de conservación, modelos espaciales de retorno económico de 28 usos alternativos de suelo y mapas espaciales de 4 amenazas. Los negocios de turismo basado en naturaleza fueron competitivos con otras formas de uso de suelo y aportaron ganancias de >$60 US millones/año a accionistas locales y al mismo tiempo ayudan a alcanzar las metas de conservación para casi la mitad de los atributos de conservación en la región bajo planificación. La consideración de los costos de oportunidad disminuyó sustancialmente los conflictos entre la diversidad biológica, el uso agrícola, la silvicultura comercial y la minería. La consideración de los beneficios económicos de la conservación y la reducción de potenciales conflictos políticos mediante planes alternativos de desarrollo puede proporcionar oportunidades para estrategias exitosas que combinan la conservación y el desarrollo sustentable y facilitan las acciones de conservación

Effective management of biodiversity in production landscapes requires a conservation approach that acknowledges the complexity of ecological and cultural systems in time and space. Fennoscandia has experienced major loss of forest biodiversity caused by intensive forestry. Therefore, the Countdown 2010 initiative to halt the loss of biodiversity in Europe is highly relevant to forest management in this part of the continent. As a contribution to meeting the challenge posed by Countdown 2010, we developed a spatially explicit conservation-planning exercise that used regional knowledge on forest biodiversity to provide support for managers attempting to halt further loss of biological diversity in the region. We used current data on the distribution of 169 species (including 68 red-listed species) representing different forest habitats and ecologies along with forest data within the frame of modern conservation software to devise a map of priority areas for conservation. The top 10% of priority areas contained over 75% of red-listed species locations and 41% of existing protected forest areas, but only 58% of these top priorities overlapped with core areas identified previously in a regional strategy that used more qualitative methods. We argue for aggregating present and future habitat value of single management units to landscape and regional scales to identify potential bottlenecks in habitat availability linked to landscape dynamics. To address the challenge of Countdown 2010, a general framework for forest conservation planning in Fennoscandia needs to cover different conservation issues, tools, and data needs.

Aggregation of reserve networks is generally considered desirable for biological and economic reasons: aggregation reduces negative edge effects and facilitates metapopulation dynamics, which plausibly leads to improved persistence of species. Economically, aggregated networks are less expensive to manage than fragmented ones. Therefore, many reserve-design methods use qualitative heuristics, such as distance-based criteria or boundary-length penalties to induce reserve aggregation. We devised a quantitative method that introduces aggregation into reserve networks. We call the method the boundary-quality penalty (BQP) because the biological value of a land unit (grid cell) is penalized when the unit occurs close enough to the edge of a reserve such that a fragmentation or edge effect would reduce population densities in the reserved cell. The BQP can be estimated for any habitat model that includes neighborhood (connectivity) effects, and it can be introduced into reserve selection software in a standardized manner. We used the BQP in a reserve-design case study of the Hunter Valley of southeastern Australia. The BQP resulted in a more highly aggregated reserve network structure. The degree of aggregation required was specified by observed (albeit modeled) biological responses to fragmentation. Estimating the effects of fragmentation on individual species and incorporating estimated effects in the objective function of reserve-selection algorithms is a coherent and defensible way to select aggregated reserves. We implemented the BQP in the context of the Zonation method, but it could as well be implemented into any other spatially explicit reserve-planning framework.