Weighing up the options: experiences in applying decision science from a large-scale conservation program

ABSTRACT The need to make evidence-based decisions in conservation planning for threatened species in the face of limited resources and knowledge is widely recognised as a growing challenge. Increasingly sophisticated decision-support tools and approaches are available to conservation programs. The ability of conservation planners to effectively implement these tools will be key to incorporating complex information into threatened species management. The development of effective decision science approaches does not end when they are made available to planners. Planner and practitioner input into their use and outputs is an important part of incorporating these tools into on-ground conservation. The New South Wales Saving our Species program is a large-scale conservation program with jurisdiction over more than 1100 threatened species, ecological communities and populations. We discuss why co-design is key to successful implementation of decision science in program-level planning; this approach has supported the Saving our Species program to account for forms of knowledge that may otherwise be ignored by data driven optimisation. This paper focuses on the role of conservation planners in developing and applying decision tools. We present three case studies that deployed tools co-developed for the Saving our Species program. Through these case studies, we suggest that effective conservation planning can be best achieved through (1) narrowing down the number of options under consideration, by eliminating sub-optimal choices (2) supporting decision-makers to understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of the choices under consideration and (3) enhancing the effectiveness of decision-support tools by integrating practitioner expertise into their application.