A new cost-benefit approach for amphibian conservation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

Habitat loss is the most important threat to species survival and the efficient selection of priority areas is fundamental for a good systematic conservation planning.
Using amphibians as conservation target, we conducted an innovative design showing that prioritization models focused on functional (FD), phylogenetic (PD), and
taxonomic diversity (TD) can include land cost-effective values. We reported new conservation hot points within the Brazilian Atlantic Forest hot spot, concerning
threatened species (TS), protected areas (PAs), and their respective land cost-effective values. We provided the land cost-effective relationships according to the area required to represent each biodiversity component assessed (FD, PD, TD, and TS). We based our land cost-effective analyses on the average value of payment for ecosystem services (PES) across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest remnants, which corresponds to $13,273 for each square kilometer given annually to the private forest landowners. Our results revealed a high FD and PD in the eastern Atlantic Forest, with the highest rates in the east central region rising to the northeast. Mapping these relationships, we revealed important spatial mismatches and congruencies among these biodiversity components. The findings of our study provide different optimization scenarios for the conservation of amphibian diversity aspects. We draw attention to the critical need for amphibian conservation efforts in Atlantic Forest, being that ~90%of FD, PD, and TD remain outside the PAs. The take-home message is that the land cost-effective outcomes attributed in our models could work as a functional PES, which, in comparison with agrarian activities, corresponds to 24.13% of the median yearly gross profit per square kilometer of an agricultural land distributed in the Atlantic Forest domain. Therefore, our findings provide other effective area-based conservation measures that set new priorities for biodiversity assessment in the Atlantic Forest, validating a novel approach to land cost-effective investigations for other species-rich regions.