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Scheduling incremental actions to build a comprehensive national protected area network for Papua New Guinea

Systematic conservation planning identifies priority areas to cost-effectively meet conservation targets. Yet, these tools rarely guide wholesale declaration of reserve systems in a single time step due to financial and implementation constraints. Rather, incremental scheduling of actions to progressively build reserve networks is required. To ensure this incremental action is guided by the original plan, and thus builds a reserve network that meets all conservation targets, strategic scheduling, and iterative planning is needed.

Minimizing cross-realm threats from land-use change: A national-scale conservation framework connecting land, freshwater and marine systems

There is a growing recognition that conservation strategies should be designed accounting for cross-realm connections, such as freshwater connections to land and sea, to ensure effectiveness of marine spatial protection and minimize perverse outcomes of changing land-use. Yet, examples of integration across realms are relatively scarce, with most targeting priorities in a single realm, such as marine or freshwater, while minimizing threats originating in terrestrial ecosystems.

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We...invite contributions covering, for example, the following topics: Innovative approaches for planning and managing multifunctional conservation landscapes; Holistic, landscape-level approaches to conservation planning and management; Lessons learned from multi-stakeholder planning approaches

Maximizing biodiversity conservation through behavior change strategies

Most modern threats to biodiversity are due to human actions. Conservation psychology models provide tools to strategically change human behaviors to reduce these threats; however, behavior change theories have yet to be fully incorporated into conservation strategic planning techniques. The public that may be interested in a conservation issue are often untapped resources to expand a conservation organization's limited reach. Increased public participation could fill a gap between an organization's objectives and the scope of what is feasible for limited staff or budget.

Use of surrogate species to cost-effectively prioritize conservation actions

Conservation efforts often focus on umbrella species whose distributions overlap with many other flora and fauna. However, because biodiversity is affected by different threats that are spatially variable, focusing only on the geographic range overlap of species may not be sufficient in allocating the necessary actions needed to efficiently abate threats. We developed a problem-based method for prioritizing conservation actions for umbrella species that maximizes the total number of flora and fauna benefiting from management while considering threats, actions, and costs.