www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America O about 12% of Earth’s land is located in protected areas, and less than half of this is managed primarily for biodiversity conservation (Hoekstra et al. 2005). Although protected areas are an essential part of any credible conservation strategy (Margules and Pressey 2000), it is becoming increasingly clear that reserves alone will ...

Concern over the ever more rapid and widespread losses of biodiversity has instigated various remedial actions: whether in situ conservation, such as the establishment of protected areas, or ex situ, such as the conservation of germplasm in gene banks. In the past, such activities were funded and managed by the public sector; however, in recent years, public support has declined and this has sp...

The cultural valuation of biodiversity has taken on renewed importance over the last two decades as the ecosystem services framework has become widely adopted. Conservation initiatives increasingly use ecosystem service frameworks to render tropical forest landscapes and their peoples legible to market-oriented initiatives such as REDD+ and biodiversity offsetting schemes. Ecosystem service app...

Several of the most important conservation prioritization approaches select markedly different areas at global and regional scales. They are designed to maximize a certain biodiversity dimension such as coverage of species in the case of hotspots and complementarity, or composite properties of ecosystems in the case of wilderness. Most comparisons between approaches have ignored the multidimens...

Citation: Weatherdon LV, Appeltans W, Bowles-Newark N, Brooks TM, Davis FE, Despot-Belmonte K, Fletcher S, Garilao C, Hilton-Taylor C, Hirsch T, Juffe-Bignoli D, Kaschner K, Kingston N, Malsch K, Regan EC, Kesner-Reyes K, Rose DC, Wetzel FT, Wilkinson T and Martin CS (2017) Blueprints of Effective Biodiversity and Conservation Knowledge Products That Support Marine Policy. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:96...