Using Public Preferences to Weight Species Prioritization Criteria in Conservation Decision Making: A Case Study to Explore Potential Strengths and Weaknesses

ABSTRACT

The conservation of biodiversity depends on the implementation of policy with limited financial resources. Due to this shortage of resources, conservation activities must be prioritized so that scarce funds are used rationally to prevent long-term biodiversity loss. To assure funding continuity, since it is the public that pays a significant part of conservation costs, it is imperative that managers and policymakers apply limited conservation funds in a way that makes people feel that their concerns about biodiversity loss are addressed. Here we argue for public preferences to be incorporated in species conservation decision making through criteria weighting. Public preferences were analyzed in two different contexts (abstract vs. concrete) to understand how stable public preferences are across different elicitation procedures. Our results show some resilience in criteria ranking, with functional importance being considered as the top criterion across different ways of questioning.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation priorities
• criteria ranking
• decision support
• preferences’ stability
• species conservation

Notes

A community page was created with the research objectives and recruitment specifications, and interested individuals were asked to contact the researcher through a private message.

Remember that through Bonferroni adjustment we obtained the new significance level of .017.