Quantifying the contribution of benefit, threat, and cost components of conservation return on investment to determining agreement levels over spatial protection priorities

Projects aimed at protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services often depend on the collaboration of multiple conservation organizations and other partners. These organizations typically have different conservation objectives, and whether organizations can agree on priorities for conservation action determines the scope for potential covariation in the organizations' return-on-investment (ROI) estimates. We decomposed the covariance of ROI levels into individual components to determine the relative contribution of spatial patterns in conservation benefits, cost, and threat to an agreement on conservation priorities. We applied our approach to land protection priorities in the contiguous United States when seeking to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Use of ROI to prioritize projects, instead of considering only conservation benefit measures, improved the level of agreement, because of the introduction of cost and threat as shared covariates, and increased overall covariance. When one organization prioritized recreation and others did not, the covariance of recreation benefits with cost and threat introduced more complexity and negated much of the improvement in agreement that using ROI offered. Our results suggest that there is much scope for collaborative conservation approaches when conservation decisions are based on ROI, and our results could help identify potential partnerships where conservation priorities will be particularly well aligned.