Understanding factors driving diversity across biodiversity hotspots is critical for formulating conservation priorities in the face of ongoing and escalating environmental deterioration. While biodiversity hotspots encompass a small fraction of Earth's land surface, more than half the world's plants and two-thirds of terrestrial vertebrate species are endemic to these hotspots. Tropical Southe...

In 1985, Michael Soulé asked, “What is conservation biology?” We revisit this question more than 25 years later and offer a revised set of core principles in light of the changed global context for conservation. Most notably, scientists now widely acknowledge that we live in a world dominated by humans, and therefore, the scientific underpinnings of conservation must include a consideration of ...

Aim In coastal marine systems, biogenic reef-building species have great importance for conservation as they provide habitat a wide range of species, promoting biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services. Biogenic reef persistence recovery from perturbations depend on recolonization by new recruits. Characterizing larval dispersal among distant reefs is key to understanding how connectivit...

Urbanization and agriculture are two of the most important threats to biodiversity worldwide. The intensities of these land-use phenomena, however, as well as levels of biodiversity itself, differ widely among regions. Thus, there is a need to develop a quick but rigorous method of identifying where high levels of human threats and biodiversity coincide. These areas are clear priorities for bio...

Our ability to identify cost-efficient priorities for conserving biological diversity is limited by the scarcity of data on conservation costs, particularly at fine scales. Here we address this issue using data for 139 terrestrial programs worldwide. We find that the annual costs of effective field-based conservation vary enormously, across seven orders of magnitude, from <$0.1 to >$1,000,000 p...

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is often advocated as a tool to assist decision-making in conservation investment and research focus. It is frequently suggested that research efforts should prioritize species in higher threat categories and those that are Data Deficient (DD). We assessed the linkage between IUCN listing and research effort in DD and Critically Endangered (CR) species, t...