Embracing Opportunism in the Selection of Priority Conservation Areas ANDREW T. KNIGHT ∗ AND RICHARD M. COWLING† ∗ DST-NRF Centre of Excellence, Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa, email tawnyfrogmouth@gmail.com †Department of Botany, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, P.O. Box 77000, Port Elizabeth 6031, South Africa Systematic Techniques There has been much written of the vagaries and short- comings of the current global protected-areas network (e.g., Bibby et al. 1992; Rodrigues et al. 2004). A history of protected-area establishment for reasons other than na- ture conservation has produced a global protected-areas network that is biased toward infertile or rugged land- scapes that are not economically valuable for production (Pressey 1994). Consequently, many areas of high priority for nature conservation are located on unprotected pri- vate lands (Knight 1999). This disparity between the in- tention and practice of protected-area selection (Pressey et al. 1993), the deepening environmental crisis ( Vitousek et al. 1997), and the woefully inadequate resources com- mitted to nature conservation (Courrier 1992) have fur- thered the development and application of systematic techniques for the selection of priority conservation ar- eas. These techniques are said to take selection of nature conservation areas “beyond opportunism,” toward scien- tific defensibility and greater effectiveness (Pressey et al. 1993). The push for the improvement and widespread adop- tion of systematic techniques has been driven largely by the recognition that the ways in which areas for nature conservation were identified in the past were largely op- portunistic. Protected areas were predominantly estab- lished on “worthless lands” (Pressey et al. 1996), where the opportunity costs of setting aside land for nature con- servation were minimal (Balmford & Whitten 2003). Sci- entifically defensible techniques were seen as the panacea for this problem of poorly targeted nature-conservation efforts; accordingly, computer-based techniques have be- come the mainstay of area-selection approaches because protected-area networks designed solely by experts tend to be highly biased toward the experts’ best-known Paper submitted December 12, 2006; revised manuscript accepted February 12, 2007. areas (Cowling et al. 2003). The focus of the bulk of peer-reviewed, area-selection studies has therefore been on testing biological data and techniques to quantifi- ably establish their limitations. The size of planning units (e.g., Pressey & Logan 1998), the appropriate resolu- tion and scale of environmental data (e.g., Pressey et al. 1999), effects of species-distribution records (e.g., Fre- itag et al. 1998), taxonomic surrogacy (e.g., Lombard et al. 2003), and differences between computer-based algo- rithms (e.g., Csuti et al. 1997) have become the mainstay of area-selection studies published in the peer-reviewed literature. A Broader Planning Context Nevertheless, in the real world, the successful selection and implementation of protected areas is the product of a complex suite of factors that are typically neither biological nor reliably predictable. The pressures of eco- nomic forces, available funding, organizational and in- stitutional capacity, political defensibility, land tenure, corruption, donor regulation and so on, push and pull on the recommendations of systematic area-selection ini- tiatives (Peters 1991; Soul´ e & Terborgh 1999). Conse- quently, the recommendations of systematic conservation assessments are often difficult to implement because they have adopted a purely scientific and biological approach to area selection and have not accounted for those so- cial, economic, and political factors that actually deter- mine the success of conservation planning (Cowling et al. 2004). Although the natural sciences play a critical role in conservation planning initiatives by providing transpar- ent and defensible information on which to base land-use decisions (Cowling et al. 2004), those of us involved in 1124 Conservation Biology Volume 21, No. 4, 1124–1126 C 2007 Society for Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00690.x