Effectiveness of current Approaches to Identifying
Priority Conservation Areas

Two weeks at the centre from 10 feb to 22 feb included the following activities:

• Two formal seminars on past, current and planned work on conservation planning in New South Wales.

• Demonstration of software system used in 1996 and currently to make decisions on new conservation areas. The system lays out the options for achieving explicit conservation targets (set as areas of each vegetation type or species range) and allows stakeholders to negotiate configurations of conservation areas. The system led to over 800,000 of public forest being deferred from logging in 1996 as well as nine new nature reserves and national parks being declared. Beginning in about July 1997, it will be used to plan new reserves throughout the State.

• Discussions about the concept of irreplaceability in conservation planning, its measurement or estimation, and its applications.

• Informal discussions with staff and visiting researchers at both NCEAS and the Department of Geography, UCSB to exchange ideas on current projects and future directions in research on systematic conservation planning.

• Arrangements for involvement in a planned NCEAS working group on conservation planning in the Intermountain Semidesert Ecoregion.

• Discussions about a long term research project involving collaboration between the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, UCSB and NCEAS. The project would investigate the development of computerised decision support systems that would change the goals of conservation planning away from targets for representation of species or communities in reserves toward targets for the persistence of species or communities in the landscape, whether or not those features were reserved. Such a system would have two major advantages for conservation planning:
  1. it would address the fundamental goal of nature conservation (persistence) much more directly;
  2. it would allow the effects of different development and reservation scenarios to be assessed in terms of their effects on the persistence of species.