Furthermore, some conservation actions appear more successful than others (Table 1). Assessments of bird conservation using the Red List data suggests conservation actions have averted 20% of the extinctions that would otherwise have occurred over the last century (Brooks et al. 2009). The data presented in this paper suggest that direct, intensive conservation actions may be similarly beneficial to mammals. Furthermore, some actions, particularly those requiring intensive management (e.g. the more derived conservation actions like reintroductions, captive breeding and hunting restrictions), appear to be more successful than others (e.g.

protected area creation, invasive species control). This analysis also illustrates some critical elements of mammalian conservation. Firstly, threatened mammals are almost invariably located within CP-673451 nmr protected areas (and yet remain threatened) and in contrast to threatened birds (Beresford et al. 2010), suggesting that more than just site protection is needed to ameliorate the majority of threatening processes. Selleck JQ1 This was supported by the generalised model (Table 1) and supports the conclusions of Short and Smith (1994) that protected area creation is a necessary but insufficient step in conserving Australian biodiversity. Nevertheless, the ineffectuality

of protected areas alone as a conservation strategy has rarely been recognised by conservation practitioners, with most threatened mammals still having protected area creation proposed as a key threat abatement strategy (Fig. 2a). This is because most IUCN protected area categories primarily protect against habitat loss (and their effectiveness is overstated; Joppa and Pfaff 2011), whereas extant biodiversity has persisted to date in the remnant habitat patches still present (but see Sang et al. 2010; Tilman et al. 1994).

In these protected areas, other threatening processes are far more influential in driving extant mammals toward extinction and this is probably exacerbated by the fact that protected areas are often isolated islands of natural habitat in a matrix of disturbed land (Maiorano et al. 2008). Even very large protected areas conserve proportionally less biodiversity than their size predicts (Cantu-Salazar and Gaston 2010). Despite HSP90 a plethora of conservation plans to create adequate and representative protected areas, this does not appear to have benefited threatened mammals. This may be simply because protected areas are satisfactory for common species and may save them from declining into threatened status. Site creation is rarely a solitary solution as there are few unaltered sites remaining for inclusion into the protected area network. While conservation planning is one of the most frequently published topics in conservation journals, conservation plans rarely identify disturbed habitats as priorities for inclusion as conservation estate.