Applying conservation reserve design strategies to define ecosystem monitoring priorities

In an era of unprecedented ecological upheaval, monitoring ecosystem change at large spatial scales and over long‐time frames is an essential endeavor of effective environmental management and conservation. However, economic limitations often preclude revisiting entire monitoring networks at high frequency. We aimed here to develop a prioritization strategy for monitoring networks to select a subset of existing sites that meets the principles of complementarity and representativeness of the whole ecological reality, and maximizes ecological complementarity (species accumulation) and the spatial and environmental representativeness. We applied two well‐known approaches for conservation design, the “minimum set” and the “maximal coverage” problems, using a suite of alpha and beta biodiversity metrics. We created a novel function for the R environment that performs biodiversity metric comparisons and site prioritization on a plot‐by‐plot basis. We tested our procedures using plot data provided by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) AusPlots, an Australian long‐term monitoring network of 774 vegetation and soil monitoring plots. We selected 250 plots and 80% of the total species recorded as targets for the maximal coverage and minimum set problems, respectively. We compared the subsets selected by the different biodiversity metrics in terms of complementarity and spatial and environmental representativeness. We found that prioritization based on species turnover (i.e., iterative selection of the most dissimilar plot to a cumulative sample in terms of species replacement) maximized ecological complementarity and spatial representativeness, while also providing high environmental coverage. Species richness was an unreliable metric for spatial representation. Selection based on range‐rarity‐richness was balanced in terms of complementarity and representativeness, whereas its richness‐corrected implementation failed to capture ecological and environmental variation. Prioritization based on species turnover is desirable to cover the maximum variability of the whole network. Synthesis and applications: Our results inform monitoring design and conservation priorities, which can benefit by considering the turnover component of beta diversity in addition to univariate metrics. Our tool is computationally efficient, free, and can be readily applied to any species versus sites dataset, facilitating rapid decision‐making.