Developing a prioritisation strategy for species conservation in Wallacea

Aligning human development and biodiversity conservation goals

A prioritisation strategy for species conservation that takes into account other regional objectives, including food security and climate change, represents a significant research challenge for many parts of the world. In this research, the challenge is addressed by developing a methodological approach to combine these objectives into a single prioritisation framework for the Lesser Sunda Islands (LSIs) in Wallacea.

This study region was chosen because it has some of the most biodiverse floras in the world but also has significant levels of drought, undernutrition, and food insecurity – creating a nexus between conservation urgency and pressing development objectives typical of many biodiversity hotspots around the world. The output from the research will be a novel prioritisation framework which highlights not only important plant species for biodiversity conservation but also those that are important for food security and nutrition during periods of drought, thereby aligning development and biodiversity conservation goals in one of the most underexplored regions of the world.

The overarching aim of the research is to develop a novel prioritisation framework that combines common measures of the conservation importance of plant species alongside those most relevant to local community concerns. There are four interlinked research objectives:

1. Identification and description at botanical and anthropological levels of the different uses of food plant species routinely collected by communities in the Lesser Sunda Islands (LSIs), Wallacea.
2. Determination of the nutritional qualities of the most important useful plants collected by local communities in the LSIs.
3. Development of a Local community Prioritisation Framework (LPF) to combine the most useful plants with their nutritional quality to find out the species most critical for food security in LSIs.
4. Comparative analysis of LPF with the widely employed current prioritisation frameworks that rank plant species according to their conservation urgency (rarity, endemicity, biological significance, vulnerability, threat status, etc.)