Prioritization of sites for plant species restoration in the Chilean Biodiversity Hotspot: A spatial multi-criteria decision analysis approach

Abstract

Various initiatives to identify global priority areas for conservation have been developed over the last 20 years (e.g. Biodiversity Hotspots). However, translating this information to actionable local scales has proven to be a major task, highlighting the necessity of efforts to bridge the global-scale priority areas with local-based conservation actions. Furthermore, as these global priority areas are increasingly threatened by climate change and by the loss and alteration of their natural habitats, developing additional efforts to identify priority areas for restoration activities is becoming an urgent task. In this study we used a Spatial Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (SMCDA) approach to help optimize the selection of sites for restoration initiatives of two endemic threatened flora species of the \"Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forest\" Hotspot. Our approach takes advantage of freely GIS software, niche modeling tools, and available geospatial databases, in an effort to provide an affordable methodology to bridge global-scale priority areas with local actionable restoration scales. We used a set of weighting scenarios to evaluate the potential effects of short-term vs long-term planning perspective in prioritization results. The generated SMCDA was helpful for evaluating, identifying and prioritizing best suitable areas for restoration of the assessed species. The method proved to be simple, transparent, cost effective and flexible enough to be easily replicable on different ecosystems. This approach could be useful for prioritizing regional-scale areas for species restoration in Chile, as well as in other countries with restricted budgets for conservation efforts.