Translating area-based conservation pledges into efficient biodiversity protection outcomes.

Ambitious national and global pledges to protect increasing areas of land risk trading conservation effectiveness for convenience of designation. We show that UK conservation areas often lie outside the highest biodiversity priority landscapes, and that systematic conservation planning can improve site selection. Cunningham et al. comment on the U.K.’s commitment to protect 30% of land by 2030, by identifying priority landscapes for expansion of the current protected area network in the UK using 445 priority species ranges across the country, under two baseline protection definitions to reach this conservation target. They find that expanding the protected area network by initially only including the strictest protected areas would yield much greater representation of threatened species, and propose new considerations for protected area commitments.