INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, the issue of identifying where we might best focus limited conservation resources has received enormous attention from conservation practitioners and academics alike. The result has been an impressive raft of real-world priority schemes (see Box 5.1, p. 77), the development of powerful techniques for systematic site selection, and the collation of several substantial data sets to which these tools can be applied. This chapter aims to review these developments, examining how priorities are currently set, and exploring how prioritisation might be further improved in future. The focus throughout is on identifying priority areas for conservation (rather than priority species, as in Chapter 4)– with a particular emphasis on the identification of the most appropriate sites for reservation (rather than on the wider landscape issues addressed in Chapters 8 and 10). For an excellent account of how the selection of priority sites fits into a broader framework of conservation planning, including the design, management and subsequent monitoring of conservation areas, see the review by Margules & Pressey (2000).

I begin by considering why prioritisation is necessary, before outlining the importance of establishing a priori the goals and scale of any priority-setting exercise. The bulk of the chapter then sets out a series of biological and human-linked concerns that need to be addressed in selecting priority sites, and examines how recent theoretical tools and real-world priority schemes tackle these concerns.