“This is important as it means that we can implement conservation actions now, instead of waiting for the collection of huge amounts of detailed, expensive biological information on where all these species groups are found” said Dr Michael Bode from the Department of Botany at the University of Melbourne.

If you only had a couple of million dollars to purchase land, which region would get you the most protected species per dollar?”

“Current conservation spending relies on identifying areas rich in species diversity – called “Biodiversity Hotspots” - our study is the first to show that, at a global scale, funding goes further when conservation costs and the rates of habitat loss are prioritised”.

Dr Bode and PhD student Marissa McBride, from the Australian Research Centre for Risk Analysis in the Department of Botany, conducted the study with international collaborators.

“We found that if we you trying to save as many species as you could, for a fixed budget, it wouldn’t matter which species groups you chose to focus on” said Ms McBride.

“We found it was more important to have information on costs and threat”.

The results revealed that if you are interested in protecting endemic plants, you would go to Madagascar. If you were interested in mammal diversity, you would also target Madagascar.

She adds “This is not because Madagascar has the most plants, or the most mammals. It also has more important attributes; land is relatively cheap, and what’s left is being destroyed at a rapid pace. Finally not much of the hotspot has yet been reserved by conservation, so every new protected area is shielding lots of new species.”

Dr Bode notes that the official list of Biodiversity Hotspots were put forward in the late 90s, and explicitly asked “in which areas [of the world] would a given conservation dollar contribute the most towards slowing the current rate of extinction of global biodiversity”. Yet they didn’t consider cost.

“Their answer to this question included Coastal California and the French Riviera alongside Indo-Burma, and the Horn of Africa. The implicit assumption was that costs would be constant across hotspots. Yes, biodiversity varies across the globe, sometimes by a factor of 10. But the costs of doing conservation vary by many orders of magnitude.”

The study is published the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, Wednesday 16 April April 2008. More information about this article: Dr Nerissa Hannink Media Promotions Officer nhannink@unimelb.edu.au Tel: +61 3 8344 8151