Umbrellas and flagships: Efficient conservation surrogates or expensive mistakes?

摘要: The use of umbrella and flagship species as surrogates for regional biota whose spatial distributions are poorly known is a popular conservation strategy. Yet many assumptions underlying the choice surrogate remain untested. By using biodiversity databases containing incidence data concern (i) southern California coastal sage scrub habitat, (ii) Columbia Plateau ecoregion, (iii) continental United States, we evaluate potential effectiveness range schemes (e.g., big carnivores, charismatic species, keystone wide-ranging species), asking how potentially protected by each scheme at what cost in habitat area. For all three databases, find that none evaluated performs significantly better than do comparable number randomly selected from database. Although some may have considerable publicity value, based on analyzed, representing diverse taxa different geographic scales, utility be limited.