Evaluating policy-relevant surrogate taxa for biodiversity conservation: a case study from British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

Conservation efforts often lead to a small proportion of species receiving a disproportionate amount of attention. This bias in funding may help or hinder broader goals of biodiversity conservation depending on the surrogacy value of the well-funded species. Surrogate species are selected to represent other taxa in a shared environment when it would be costly or impractical to obtain information on individual taxa. We compared the surrogacy value of common groups of taxa implicated in conservation — game species, carnivores, non-game species, and other species. Using a publicly available data set of species–habitat associations, we compared the surrogacy value for 1012 species and 64 habitat types in British Columbia, Canada. We used a conditional entropy metric to quantify pairwise associations between species via their occurrence in different habitat types. Our analysis reveals that game and non-game species surrogacy groups do not significantly differ in either the frequency of captured pairwise associations or their coverage of species. These results suggest that funding game species conservation is likely conferring some benefits to non-game species, but optimal habitat-based conservation outcomes will come from a combination of taxa. This analysis provides an important step in influencing management decisions for the preservation of biodiversity in British Columbia.