2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference

March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH

5/24/2018 | 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM | CONSERVING RARE SPECIES CAN HAVE HIGH OPPORTUNITY COSTS FOR COMMON SPECIES | 410 B

CONSERVING RARE SPECIES CAN HAVE HIGH OPPORTUNITY COSTS FOR COMMON SPECIES

The most common species play disproportionately important roles in ecosystems, and small proportional declines in their abundance can result in significant disruption of ecosystem structure, function and services. Conservation practitioners thus face difficult choices in apportioning limited resources between rare species (to ensure their existence) and common species (to ensure their abundance and ecosystem contributions). We quantified the opportunity costs of conserving rare species of migratory fishes in the context of removing dams and retrofitting road culverts across 1,883 tributaries of the North American Great Lakes. We found that investments in rare species can have a remarkably high opportunity cost: small habitat gains for the rarest species are achieved at the expense of more than 20 times as much habitat for more common ones. These opportunity costs are likely to occur in many ecosystems because range limits and conservation costs often vary widely among species. Given that common species worldwide are declining more rapidly than rare ones within major taxa, our findings provide incentive for triage among multiple worthy conservation targets.

Connectivity
Restoration
Great Lakes

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Presenters/Authors

Thomas Neeson (), University of Oklahoma, thomas.neeson@gmail.com;