Using a Systematic Approach to Select Flagship Species for Bird Conservation

Conservation marketing campaigns that focus on flagship species play a vital role in biological

diversity conservation because they raise funds and change people’s behavior. However, most flagship species

are selected without considering the target audience of the campaign, which can hamper the campaign’s

effectiveness. To address this problem, we used a systematic and stakeholder-driven approach to select flagship

species for a conservation campaign in the Serra do Urubu in northeastern Brazil. We based our techniques

on environmental economic and marketing methods. We used choice experiments to examine the species

attributes that drive preference and latent-class models to segment respondents into groups by preferences and

socioeconomic characteristics. We used respondent preferences and information on bird species inhabiting

the Serra do Urubu to calculate a flagship species suitability score. We also asked respondents to indicate

their favorite species from a set list to enable comparison between methods. The species’ traits that drove

audience preference were geographic distribution, population size, visibility, attractiveness, and survival in

captivity. However, the importance of these factors differed among groups and groups differed in their views

on whether species with small populations and the ability to survive in captivity should be prioritized. The

popularity rankings of species differed between approaches, a result that was probably related to the different

ways in which the 2 methods measured preference. Our new approach is a transparent and evidence-based

method that can be used to refine the way stakeholders are engaged in the design of conservation marketing

campaigns.