Well targeted biodiversity conservation actions, including investments in conservation on private land, require high-quality, consistent sources of information to identify locations of high importance for biodiversity conservation and to assess the potential of management actions to yield conservation benefits.

The National Biodiversity Assessment System (NBAS) is part of the Ecological Knowledge System developed in partnership with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, to support Australia’s Nature Repair Market. The framework for NBAS builds on advances in ‘whole-system’ approaches to biodiversity conservation assessment. It aims to provide a nationally consistent approach to assess a project site’s current and potential future contributions to biodiversity conservation.

Version 1 of NBAS integrates continent-wide data covering the distribution of biodiversity, habitat condition and habitat connectivity, to model the increase in ecosystem-wide biodiversity persistence that is expected to result from a project as a result of both locally enhanced ecosystem condition and regionally enhanced habitat connectivity. The expected local change in ecosystem condition is determined from state-and-transition models, using information from an on-ground site assessment. The state-and-transition models synthesise knowledge from a range of sources to describe ecosystem states, the condition values associated with those states, and the drivers (including restoration actions) that can cause transitions between them.

Lastly, NBAS also integrates a measure of the conservation significance of the ecosystem type in which the project is undertaken. The conservation significance metric reflects higher scores for ecosystems that are naturally rare and/or extensively degraded.

This talk will present the methods and metrics used in the system and will discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in such an ambitious, national-level biodiversity assessment platform.

Conservation decision-making (CDM) is often complex, incorporating uncertain information from various sources that can make decisions sub-optimal. Systematic decision-making frameworks aid CDM by incorporating uncertain information, but currently lacks systematic guidance on precisely how much uncertainty should be reduced through information collection. A value of information (VoI) framework can provide systematic guidance on precisely how much uncertainty should be reduced through targeted investment in information collection. The VoI analysis prospectively investigates the trade-off between the costs and benefits of acquiring new information to reduce uncertainty, and what impact this has on the decision being made. Essentially articulating the “value” of collecting information (i.e., conducting research). Predator proof fences purport to keep invasive predators out of an enclosure, restoring original ecological dynamics to native species. However, the decision of installing a predator proof fence is often riddled with uncertainty, including factors like fence installation feasibility and costs, predator eradication feasibility and costs, ongoing effectiveness of keeping predators out, and logistics of installation. In Mt Pitt Norfolk Island National Park, Australia, the ongoing management of invasive predators (feral cats, rodents, and feral chickens) keeps them at a suppressed level, but the predators are still threatening native birds and snails, and have previously driven lizards extinct from this area. The decision context considered is whether to halt on-going perpetual invasive predator management and instead install a predator proof fence with eradication efforts complimented with on-going monitoring. Here, we present the concept and some preliminary analysis of the VoI that will help decision-makers decide on what is the optimal balance between collection costs and benefit when considering reducing uncertainty.

Climate change will have profound and unexpected impacts on biodiversity in the future. These impacts could potentially be mitigated through adaptive and responsive conservation planning, but it remains unclear how adaptation opportunities can be harnessed through careful planning of present-day activities. Here, we show that the use of flexible conservation strategies that exploit opportunities for climate adaptation can mitigate climate risks without increasing total conservation costs. We estimate the value of allowing flexible delays of conservation investments for protecting habitats of the iconic and threatened koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in eastern Australia. Conservation strategies that have no option to strategically delay investments face significant trade-offs between minimizing conservation costs and reducing risks in conservation outcomes. These trade-offs are substantially mitigated by flexible strategies that strategically delay investments into the future when the effects of climate change are likely to be better understood. Strategic delays are shown to mitigate climate risks in inflexible conservation strategies without even increasing conservation costs. These results show that conservation planning that strategically allocates present-day conservation resources while also allowing the flexibility to shift these resources in the future is much more likely to achieve cost-effective conservation outcomes in the face of uncertain climate change impacts.