A social-ecological decision framework to support grassland bird conservation in the Upper Missouri River Basin

Grasslands in the North American Great Plains are among the world’s most imperiled and least conserved ecosystems. In the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB), a region of current and former grasslands vital for grassland bird biodiversity, most land is privately owned, making voluntary conservation essential. Bird populations face threats from habitat loss and fragmentation, primarily due to agriculture, the dominant land use. UMRB residents value these landscapes for agriculture, recreation, and conservation. Our objectives are to demonstrate how maps of social values, derived from UMRB resident surveys, can be integrated with modeled grassland bird species richness and the risk of habitat loss to develop a conservation decision framework that informs conservation design and improves targeting of strategies on unprotected private lands. We used a public participation GIS survey to collect spatial data on social values and applied the Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SolVES) tool to model conservation and recreation values. These were paired with modeled bird species richness, using hotspot analyses and spatial overlays to identify areas of co-occurring social and biodiversity value. We then assessed the risk of projected grassland habitat loss across different hotspot combinations. Results showed that areas with high or moderate social and biodiversity value made up 40% of unprotected land but accounted for 51% of projected habitat loss. This is 26% more habitat at risk than expected based on area alone. Targeting appropriate conservation strategies in these areas could yield disproportionately larger benefits in reducing the risk of habitat loss.