Prioritization of sites for plant species restoration in the Chilean Biodiversity 1 Hotspot : A spatial multi - criteria decision analysis approach

19 20 Various initiatives to identify global priority areas for conservation have been developed over the last 20 21 years (e.g. Biodiversity Hotspots). However, translating this information to actionable local scales has 22 proven to be a major task, highlighting the necessity of efforts to bridge the global-scale priority areas with 23 local-based conservation actions. Furthermore, as these global priority areas are increasingly threatened 24 by climate change and by the loss and alteration of their natural habitats, developing additional efforts to 25 identify priority areas for restoration activities is becoming an urgent task. In this study we used a Spatial 26 Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (SMCDA) approach to help optimize the selection of sites for restoration 27 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/026716 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Sep. 13, 2015;