Identifying practical pathways from animal culture theory to conservation practice

Wildlife conservation has traditionally focused on the maintenance of population size, preserving genetic diversity and protecting habitats, with success typically measured through stable or increasing population estimates, slower population declines, and reduced threats. However, preserving animal cultures and behavioural diversity is gaining recognition as important for conservation. This shift reflects growing awareness that cultural behaviours can contribute to the resilience and long-term survivability of species, with some socially learned behaviours promoting a species' adaptive potential. Despite increasing public support and adoption of policies within this domain, questions persist about how cultural behaviours can be applied to conservation. Drawing on our collective expertise, we outline practical pathways to integrate animal culture into conservation decision-making through a cross-species framework. First, we describe how animal culture and behavioural diversity can be deployed in practice as conservation goals, conservation targets, and conservation tools. As conservation goals, they provide overall direction for conservation efforts, while as conservation targets, they serve as the specific units of focus to meet a conservation goal. These targets may be specific cultural behaviours or variants, the socio-ecological conditions that support them, cultural diversity, or the processes that sustain cultural diversity within and across populations. As conservation tools, they can be invoked to conserve targets or more generally to meet a broader goal. For example, incorporating cultural behaviour as a conservation-relevant characteristic when defining management units (tool) can be used to protect specific song dialects or foraging traditions in cetaceans (target), while simultaneously improving conservation outcomes by explicitly including culture in decision-making (goal). Consequently, we show how culture-based conservation goals, targets and tools are interconnected within conservation planning and decision making, and are actionable across taxa. By providing this toolkit we emphasise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to applying animal cultures to conservation and encourage practitioners to consider how our multidimensional framework can be tailored to their current and planned conservation efforts.