Conservation planning across realms: enhancing connectivity for multi-realm species

Connectivity plays a key role in biodiversity conservation as it sustains ecological processes important for the maintenance of populations such as migrations. Connectivity is especially relevant for species that rely on different realms during their life cycle or use different realms daily or seasonally (multi-realm species). However, effort to address conservation across multiple realms have focused on identifying priority areas for conservation in a single realm (mostly marine) accounting for threats propagating from other realms or single species needs. Here, we demonstrate how to identify priority areas for conservation across three different realms (freshwater-terrestrial, estuary and marine) for multiple species, including some multi-realm species, that inhabit or move across the three realms. We use the whole Tagus River Basin, its estuary and nearby marine area as a case study. We compared the allocation of priority areas and spatial connectivity achieved under three scenarios:...