Non-government organizations (NGOs), agencies and research groups around the world have developed diverse approaches to conservation planning at the scale of landscapes and seascapes. This diversity partly reflects healthy differences in objectives, backgrounds of planners, and assumptions about data and conservation priorities. Diversity also has disadvantages, including confusion among donors and prospective conservation planners about what to fund and how to plan. To help reduce this confusion, we compared approaches described in separate articles by four major conservation NGOs. We structured our comparison with an 11-stage framework for conservation planning. We found considerable agreement between approaches in their recognition and ways of addressing many planning stages. The approaches diverged most obviously in ways of collecting socio-economic and biodiversity data and identifying explicit conservation objectives. Even here, however, the approaches tend to be complementary and there is potential to combine them in many landscapes and seascapes. Our review emphasizes that systematic methods are having real benefits in guiding effective conservation investments. We finish by outlining two challenges for conservation planning generally: (1) managing the transition from planning to applying conservation actions, and (2) assessing the costs and benefits of conservation planning.

Since its discovery in 2002 the small colony of northern bald ibis Geronticus eremita in the central Syrian desert remains at perilously low numbers, despite good productivity and some protection at their breeding grounds. The Syrian birds are migratory and return rates of young birds appear to have been poor but because the migration route and wintering sites were unknown little could be done to address any problems away from Syria. Satellite tracking of three adult birds in 2006–2007 has shown they migrate through Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen to the central highlands of Ethiopia. The three tagged birds and one other adult were found at the wintering site but none of the nine younger birds that also left Syria were with them. At least four birds wintered elsewhere because they returned to the colony the following spring. The return migration followed the western shore of the Red Sea through Eritrea to Sudan before crossing the Red Sea into Saudi Arabia, then northwards to Syria. The adults appeared to be at low risk on the wintering site although we recommend protection. Threats along the migration route now need to be assessed and mitigated, and further effort made to determine the movements of subadults and young birds.

The giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca, endemic to China, is perhaps the most powerful and well-known global icon of biodiversity conservation, having been the symbol of WWF since it was formed in 1961. It is categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Although there have been conservation successes for the giant panda in the last 2 decades, with 59 reserves established for the species, many conservation challenges remain and the species' status on the IUCN Red List has not changed since 1990, when it was first categorized as Endangered. Habitat fragmentation, synchronous bamboo flowering and die-off, and mismanagement of reserves are continuing challenges.

The Landscape Species Approach is a framework developed by the Wildlife Conservation Society for planning landscape-scale conservation based on a suite of focal species. The approach has so far been implemented at 12 terrestrial and two marine sites. We demonstrate the approach using two sites, the Adirondack Park, USA, and San Guillermo-Laguna Brava Landscape, Argentina. We describe the spatially explicit components, including steps to map the attainable (Biological Landscape), current, and future distribution of Landscape Species, human activities (Human Landscapes) and their impacts on Landscape Species, the possible impacts of conservation actions (Conservation Landscapes), and a procedure to set spatial conservation priorities. We discuss advantages and innovations of the approach, including how it incorporates both vulnerability of biodiversity and possible recovery. Finally, we discuss improvements that can be made to the approach, costs, and implications for conservation at the two sites.