Assessing the global impact of targeted conservation actions on species abundance

Abstract

In recent years, vertebrate population abundance has declined at unprecedented rates (WWF 2020). In response, targeted conservation measures - such as breeding programs or species-specific habitat management - have been applied to halt population declines, aid population recovery, and reduce and reverse the loss of biodiversity (Salafsky et al. 2008; Bolam et al. 2020). Until now, assessments of conservation actions have focused on the extent to which they reduce extinction risk, impact populations within protected areas, or increase the global area of land under protection (Hoffmann et al. 2010, 2015; Barnes et al. 2016; Maxwell et al. 2020; Bolam et al. 2020; Grace et al. 2021a). Here, we record and analyze conservation actions for 26,904 vertebrate populations from 4,629 species, to measure the impact of targeted conservation on vertebrate abundance. Using a counterfactual approach to represent population trends in the absence of conservation, we demonstrate that targeted actions have delivered substantial positive effects on the abundance of recipient vertebrate populations worldwide. We show that, in the absence of conservation, a global indicator of vertebrate abundance would have declined even more. Positive population trends were associated with vertebrate populations subject to species or habitat management. We demonstrate that targeted conservation actions can help to reverse global biodiversity loss and show the value of counterfactual analysis for impact evaluation - an important step towards reversing biodiversity declines.