Defining assets

Of the 917 species listed under the BC Act, only a subset was appropriate to include in a prioritization of management investment based on cost efficiency. Species fitting the following criteria were excluded from the prioritization:

Those with insufficient data or expert knowledge on distribution, ecology and/or management requirements available to develop an effective management project (data-deficient management stream);

those that do not currently require any active intervention or investment beyond existing policies to be secure in the long term (keep watch management stream);

those having a large geographic range and/or being highly mobile and/or highly dispersed (constrains the ability to spatially define management or objectives) (landscape management stream); and

those with less than 10% of their total population occurring within NSW (generally either common in, or management is coordinated by other jurisdictions, therefore a lower priority for investment) (partnership management stream).

A more detailed explanation of species’ allocation to different management streams under the SoS program can be found in the Saving our Species Technical Report [22].

After applying these filters, 368 species (independent assets; 312 plants, 47 animals and 9 fungi) were selected for inclusion in the prioritization process (as of December 2013; additional species have been included since). Generally, species included in the prioritization had discrete populations that could be geographically defined, critical threats at those sites that could be identified and feasibly managed (given resources), and it was predicted that mitigation of those threats at key sites would secure the species from extinction in NSW in the long term.