Globally, the geographic ranges of numerous species are contracting. Identifying spatiotemporal patterns of threat impact can illuminate why species decline in some parts of their range but persist in others. We developed a correlative approach to identify species’ response thresholds and locate ecological refuge areas associated with persistence to inform conservation planning and management. We integrated changes in realized...

Many conservation challenges require negotiating trade‐offs between the needs of different actors. Global frameworks such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework explicitly call for diverse participation and social equity in conservation decision‐making. Achieving this requires integrating equity into both decisions and decision‐making processes. Despite shifts toward strengthening social equity, practical guidan...

Water pollution from agricultural, industrial, and urban activities threatens aquatic ecosystems and the essential services they provide. Excess nitrogen has been identified as a key driver of water quality degradation, impacting biodiversity, food security, and human health. One approach to mitigating nitrogen pollution is water quality offsetting, compensating for pollution impacts by implementing nitrogen reduction measures...

Aim Land‐use change is a major threat to biodiversity, yet there remains considerable unexplained variation in how it affects different populations of the same species. Here, we examine how sensitivity to forest cover changes depending on proximity to different limits of a species' range. By comparing responses as species approach their coastal (‘hard’) and inland (‘soft’) range limits, we aim to provide insight into the relat...

Plans for expanding protected area systems (prioritizations) need to fulfill conservation objectives. They also need to account for other factors, such as economic feasibility and anthropogenic land‐use requirements. Although prioritizations are often generated with decision support tools, most tools have limitations that hinder their use for decision‐making. We outlined how the prioritizr R package ( https://prioritizr.net )...

Most protected area (PA) planning aims to improve biota representation within the PA system, but this does not necessarily achieve the best outcomes for biota retention across regions when we also consider habitat loss in areas outside the PA system. Here, we assess the implications that different PA expansion strategies can have on the retention of species habitat across an entire region. Using retention of forest habitat for...

Protected areas are a key instrument for conservation. Despite this, they are vulnerable to risks associated with weak governance, land‐use intensification, and climate change. We used a novel hierarchical optimization approach to identify priority areas for expanding the global protected area system that explicitly accounted for such risks while maximizing protection of all known terrestrial vertebrate species. To incorporate...

Monitoring is critical to assess management effectiveness, but broadscale systematic assessments of monitoring to evaluate and improve recovery efforts are lacking. We compiled 1808 time series from 71 threatened and near‐threatened terrestrial and volant mammal species and subspecies in Australia (48% of all threatened mammal taxa) to compare relative trends of populations subject to different management strategies. We adapte...

Due to climate change, megafires are increasingly common and have sudden, extensive impacts on many species over vast areas, leaving decision makers uncertain about how best to prioritize recovery. We devised a decision‐support framework to prioritize conservation actions to improve species outcomes immediately after a megafire. Complementary locations are selected to extend recovery actions across all fire‐affected species’ h...

With the intention of securing industry‐free land and seascapes, protecting wilderness entered international policy as a formal target for the first time in the zero draft of the Post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Given this increased prominence in international policy, it is timely to consider the extent to which the construct of wilderness supports global conservation object...

Biodiversity conservation decisions are difficult, especially when they involve differing values, complex multidimensional objectives, scarce resources, urgency, and considerable uncertainty. Decision science embodies a theory about how to make difficult decisions and an extensive array of frameworks and tools that make that theory practical. We sought to improve conceptual clarity and practical application of decision science...

Marxan is the most common decision‐support tool used to inform the design of protected‐area systems. The original version of Marxan does not consider risk and uncertainty associated with threatening processes affecting protected areas, including uncertainty about the location and condition of species’ populations and habitats now and in the future. We described and examined the functionality of a modified version of Marxan, Ma...

Species that cannot adapt or keep pace with a changing climate are likely to need human intervention to shift to more suitable climates. While hundreds of articles mention using translocation as a climate‐change adaptation tool, in practice, assisted migration as a conservation action remains rare, especially for animals. This is likely due to concern over introducing species to places where they may become invasive. However,...

Protected‐area systems should conserve intraspecific genetic diversity. Because genetic data require resources to obtain, several approaches have been proposed for generating plans for protected‐area systems (prioritizations) when genetic data are not available. Yet such surrogate‐based approaches remain poorly tested. We evaluated the effectiveness of potential surrogate‐based approaches based on microsatellite genetic data c...

Biological invasions are a major human induced global change that is threatening global biodiversity by homogenizing the world’s fauna and flora. Species spread because humans have moved species across geographical boundaries and have changed ecological factors that structure ecosystems, such as nitrogen deposition, disturbance, etc. Many biological invasions are caused accidentally, as a byproduct of human travel and commerce...