Abstract for presentation at Biodiversity Extinction Crisis Conference - A Pacific Response

While systematic conservation planning has been applied in terrestrial and marine settings for decades, some freshwater applications have slowly been developed. In this paper, we present two possible frameworks for riverine conservation planning using three key properties of river systems.
• irreplaceability/conservation value
• current condition
• future threats
In the first framework, the three properties are kept separate. Priority catchments for river reserves according to this framework are catchments in good condition with a high conservation value and high level of future threats. Catchments with high conservation value that are degraded are flagged for restoration. We demonstrate this approach with a dataset from Victoria. Irreplaceability was estimated from modeled and actual distributions of 400 invertabrate taxa using a complementarity based approach. Condition was derived from GIS maps using PCA (principal components analysis) and the potential for land use change was the main future threat used.
The second framework integrates the three measures from the start. After setting conservation targets, the objective of the framework is to find an optimal investment strategy in which current and future threats are mitigated while meeting sustainable conservation targets. An analytic solution for this problem is impossible, as measures taken upstream affect every catchment downstream. We approximated the best solution using a simulated annealing algorithm in which investments are randomly allocated to and taken from subcatchments until an optimal solution is found.