Multispecies Conservation Planning on U.S. Federal Lands

This chapter reviews past approaches and some significant recent advances in multispecies conservation planning. Most comprehensive conservation strategies are similar in that they invoke a set of key conservation planning principles, for example, the selection of reserve sites is based on characteristics such as their representation, resilience, and redundancy, or complementarity, irreplaceability, and vulnerability. A conservation strategy has representation and complementarity if it provides habitat for each species at one or more locations on the landscape. The design of most comprehensive multispecies conservation planning efforts invokes some form of a "coarse filter" and/or "fine filter" approach. The coarse filter is usually considered to function at broad spatial scales and to reflect underlying ecological processes that are operative over long temporal scales. The fine filter is most often used in reference to individual species or groups of functionally related species. The concept of the mesofilter is introduced to bridge the gap between more traditional coarse and fine filter approaches. The mesofilter concentrates on habitat elements that are too small to be the focus of reserve design strategies, but that often may be limiting the populations of some species. Sample elements retained by the mesofilter include large logs and snags, riparian zones, seeps and springs, and rock outcrops.