Assessing spatio-temporal priorities for species’ recovery in broad-scale dynamic landscapes

1. As threats to biodiversity from environmental change increase, assessing priorities for mitigation action becomes increasingly important. However, there have been few attempts to schedule actions across broad spatial extents that explicitly account for dynamic ecological processes and threats. 2. We combined a dynamic occupancy model with a decision analysis framework to spatially allocate multiple recovery actions to maximize species’ probability of occupancy under threats posed by climate and land-use change. We used the koala Phascolarctos cinereus across the Australian state of New South Wales (810 000 km2) to illustrate this approach. We considered four actions implemented on a 10 × 10 km2 grid: reduce domestic dog attacks through dog control, reduce vehicle collisions through fencing highways, protect habitat through land acquisitions and restore Eucalyptus forest. We used the occupancy model to predict ecological responses to recovery actions and simulated annealing to identif...