Targeting conservation actions at species threat response thresholds

To improve the status of the world's biodiversity by 2030, conservation actions must not only seek to halt or slow biodiversity loss, they must increase species' populations. A better mechanistic understanding of biodiversity loss and of species' sensitivities to certain intensities of threats is needed to target conservation actions effectively. Moving beyond ordinal space-for-time substitution analyses, towards monitoring concurrent changes in threats and species' populations over time will help achieve this. We propose a framework to quantify species' response thresholds along gradients of threat intensity, using a combination of threat-sensitive taxa, biogeographic regions, and biomes. This framework will allow efficient targeting of conservation actions, of relevance to global policy-making.