Where conservation and restoration matter most: sensitivity-based prioritization of connected forest

Abstract

Achieving global conservation and restoration targets requires knowing not only how much land to conserve and restore, but also where such actions will have the greatest ecological effect. Conservation and, in particular, restoration priorities are often inferred from habitat condition, opportunity, or broad ecological value, yet these criteria do not necessarily identify where local changes generate the largest landscape-scale consequences. Building on sensitivity-based conservation prioritization, we extend the approach to derive ecological loss and gain potential by differentiating a persistence-relevant connectivity metric with respect to local habitat condition. Sensitivity identifies areas where local degradation or improvement would most strongly affect connected habitat at the landscape scale. Combining sensitivity with current condition distinguishes high loss potential, where degradation would have large ecological consequences, from high gain potential, where ecological improvement could generate large benefits. Applying the framework to national forest-naturalness data in Norway, we show that loss and gain potential are spatially related but far from redundant, and that gain potential is not simply concentrated in the most degraded forests. Both high-loss and high-gain areas were poorly represented within current protected areas, although loss potential was consistently better represented than gain potential. Extending sensitivity-based prioritization in this way provides a general and scalable means of linking local habitat-condition change to persistence-relevant landscape outcomes, while distinguishing the ecological potentials that can inform conservation and restoration decisions.