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ABSTRACT Conservation initiatives depend on interactions among organizations and communities that have different goals. Multilevel hierarchies provide a common decision‐making structure with different actors responsible for conservation decisions over nested spatial scales. We examine consequences of hierarchical decision‐making for spatial prioritization of new protected areas. We combine insights from general theory, an algebraic example, and a numerical application, the latter motivated by federal‐to‐state grant‐giving in the western United States. Working through a decision‐making hierarchy means fewer species can be protected for a given budget than suggested by analyses that ignore the role of conservation institutions in decision‐making. This efficiency cost results from higher level decision‐makers—the federal government in our numerical application—giving up control to lower level actors—state governments in this case. Ensuring close agreement over spatial priorities between actors can limit potential losses in how much biodiversity can be protected. By reallocating funds among lower level actors, the higher level actor can mitigate remaining losses. Spatial optimization approaches that ignore the integral role of institutions in conservation, like decision‐making hierarchies, overestimate what protected area programs can achieve and risk misallocating limited conservation funds. Accounting for multilevel decision‐making reveals where building consensus among actors will be particularly important and suggests alternative strategies that conservation funders can pursue. 

Abstract Choices conservation organizations make when designing and implementing protected area strategies affect the timing of land protection. Well‐timed habitat protection will have a greater impact on biodiversity outcomes; yet, decisions affecting the timing of protection have received much less attention than other aspects of protected area design. We reviewed evidence on the timing of protected area establishment and on temporal variation in factors influencing the ecological effectiveness and cost‐effectiveness of establishing protected areas. Protected area coverage often increases in episodic bursts rather than at some uniform rate. Moreover, temporal variation in biodiversity indicators, habitat conversion threats, and the cost of protecting land suggests that the conservation benefit of protecting land at some times will be greater than that at others. Conservation organizations increase their flexibility to choose when they protect land by using flexibility‐creating mechanisms, such as loans, multiyear budgeting, and endowment management. Models and theory suggest how this can be done to have the largest positive impact for conservation by exploiting long‐ and short‐term variation in factors that affect the rate of biodiversity return on protected area investments. 

Abstract Managing social‐ecological systems (SES) requires balancing the need to tailor actions to local heterogeneity and the need to work over large areas to accommodate the extent of SES. This balance is particularly challenging for policy since the level of government where the policy is being developed determines the extent and resolution of action.We make the case for a new research agenda focused on ecological federalism that seeks to address this challenge by capitalizing on the flexibility afforded by a federalist system of governance. Ecological federalism synthesizes the environmental federalism literature from law and economics with relevant ecological and biological literature to address a fundamental question: What aspects of SES should be managed by federal governments and which should be allocated to decentralized state governments?This new research agenda considers the bio‐geo‐physical processes that characterize state‐federal management tradeoffs for biodiversity conservation, resource management, infectious disease prevention, and invasive species control. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog. 

Given declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services, funding to support conservation must be invested effectively. However, funds for conservation often come with geographic restrictions on where they can be spent. We introduce a method to demonstrate to supporters of conservation how much more could be achieved if they were to allow greater flexibility over conservation funding. Specifically, we calculated conservation exchange rates that summarized gains in conservation outcomes available if funding originating in one location could be invested elsewhere. We illustrate our approach by considering nongovernmental organization funding and major federal programs within the US and a range of conservation objectives focused on biodiversity and ecosystem services. We show that large improvements in biodiversity and ecosystem service provision are available if geographic constraints on conservation funding were loosened. Finally, we demonstrate how conservation exchange rates can be used to spotlight promising opportunities for relaxing geographic funding restrictions.