Unity from diversity? Conservation design in the Pacific Islands

Collaborative design and delivery of conservation at landscape scales is a key goal of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), potentially multiplying the effectiveness of LCC member organizations and providing a means to address widespread and shared threats to biodiversity, such as global climate change.  Several LCCs consist partly or entirely of marine archipelagos, which have features in common that challenge some assumptions of landscape conservation design as practiced in continental settings.  Ecological and societal features of islands which are critical to effective conservation design differ markedly from those on continents.  We present the Pacific Islands as an illustrative example of the challenges involved in island conservation design and implementation.  These challenges include social factors such as governance, institutional capacity, and looming loss of island habitability; biological factors such as endemism and lack of common species; technical factors such as lack of climate projections and monitoring infrastructure; and scale issues in which tiny island systems interact with a fluid oceanic matrix.  This diversity of landscapes and challenges suggests key features needed for an island-relevant approach to conservation design.