Systematic conservation planning is a target-driven process for designing protected area systems and other ecological networks. This important topic has been written about extensively in the scientific literature by everyone from data-mining academics to workshop-weary practitioners, with many articles describing how biodiversity data has been used to identify priority areas. This array of publications can be overwhelming and we have long needed an informed synthesis of all this work. Fortunately, this book by Margules and Sarkar does a great deal to fill that gap, providing an important resource for students, academics and practitioners.

The book's first chapter sets the scene nicely and describes an 11 step planning process that starts with stakeholder identification and ends with periodic conservation network reassessment. This chapter also includes a telling example from Sarkar's home state of Texas, where tax exemptions given to landowners for maintaining or restoring natural habitats were worth more than USD 1 billion in 2003. Such funding could help transform conservation in the region but there is no prioritization of where money would be best spent to achieve conservation goals. Unfortunately, this situation is far from unique: agri-environmental schemes in Europe are often equally unfocus (van der Horst, 2007, Journal of Environmental Management, 85, 1076-1087), and protected area network development continues to be poorly planned in many countries (Rodrigues et al., 2004, Bioscience, 54, 1092-1100). This lack of a systematic framework also make it difficult for countries to integrate the funding priorities of different conservation donors (Smith et al., 2006, Oryx, 40, 400-410) and target proposed avoided deforestation schemes (Gullison et al., 2007, Science, 316, 985-986).

The book provides a guide to collecting and analysing the data needed for such a systematic approach, beginning with chapters on identifying suitable biodiversity surrogates, collecting biodiversity distribution data and using modelling to map species and habitat distributions. All of these aspects are well explained and each section includes worked examples and case studies that help illustrate the different approaches and techniques. The fifth chapter describes the principles behind systematic conservation planning, detailing the problems associated with ad hoc approaches to designing conservation area networks and explaining the limitations of traditional methods based on scoring and ranking techniques. The sixth chapter covers issues of persistence and vulnerability, discussing methods for incorporating biological processes, as well as population and habitat-based viability analysis. This chapter also reviews methods for setting targets to ensure the persistence of the selected conservation features and provides helpful worked examples.

The seventh chapter is on satisfying multiple criteria and is the first to focus on non-biological information. It briefly describes the type of quantitative socio-economic data that can be incorporated and then reviews a range of mathematical techniques for including these data in priority setting exercises. The eighth chapter discusses systematic conservation plans and again adopts the useful approach of illustrating the process using case studies. The concluding chapter includes sections on coping with data uncertainty and the role of conservation planning in agricultural and urban landscapes. This chapter also re-emphasises that systematic conservation planning is designed to help local experts make policy decisions, and so needs to feed into a broader implementation framework.

The importance of such a framework is perhaps best illustrated by work from the Cape Floristic Region, one of the case studies used in the conservation plans chapter to illustrate the value of engaging with a wide range of collaborators. The trail-blazing nature of this project is widely recognised (Balmford, 2003, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 18, 435-438) but it is also unusual for adopting a self-reflective approach that involves discussing limitations and identifying potential improvements (Knight et al., 2006, Conservation Biology, 20, 739-750). This self-assessment concluded that the Cape project focused too much on the scientific aspect of the work and not enough on implementation (Marris, 2007, Nature, 450, 152-155), emphasizing that collecting and analysing biological data often plays a vital but relatively minor role in the whole process. So, I hope that we will soon see a synthesis of the growing literature on the social aspects of conservation planning. Such a resource would complement this book by Margules and Sarkar and fill another important gap.