Extinction‐risk assessments aim to identify biological diversity features threatened with extinction. Although largely developed at the species level, these assessments have recently been applied at the ecosystem level. In South Africa, national legislation provides for the listing and protection of threatened ecosystems. We assessed how land‐cover mapping and the detail of ecosystem classification affected the results of risk...

Key goals of conservation are to protect both species and the functional and genetic diversity they represent. A strictly species‐based approach may underrepresent rare, threatened, or genetically distinct species and overrepresent widespread species. Although reserves are created for a number of reasons, including economic, cultural, and ecological reasons, their efficacy has been measured primarily in terms of how well speci...

Decisions about where conservation actions are implemented are based on incomplete knowledge about biodiversity. The Protea Atlas is a comprehensive database, containing information collated over a decade. Using this data set in a series of retrospective simulations, we compared the outcome from different scenarios of information gain, and habitat protection and loss, over a 20‐year period. We assumed that there was no informa...

Complementarity‐based reserve selection algorithms efficiently prioritize sites for biodiversity conservation, but they are data‐intensive and most regions lack accurate distribution maps for the majority of species. We explored implications of basing conservation planning decisions on incomplete and biased data using occurrence records of the plant family Proteaceae in South Africa. Treating this high‐quality database as ‘com...