Ambitious commitments under the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, including protecting at least 30% of land area and restoring 20% of ecosystems, are an opportunity to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Achieving these objectives would benefit from coordinated, integrated and biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning approaches to identify where conservation and restoration actions will be most effective and resilient. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) provides such a framework, but its outputs are often complex and need to be translated into actionable and interpretable information for decision makers.

Here in the context of the NaturaConnect project, we developed stand-alone policy support tools designed to bridge this gap between science, policy and practice, specifically tailored to the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy in the terrestrial realm. Specifically, we developed two interactive platforms, described in this deliverable: NaturaConnector and PriorityCheck. Both tools are web-based and enable to visualise spatially explicit prioritisation outputs generated using the prioritizr R-package. We produced multiple spatial scenarios reflecting different objectives and planning assumptions, allowing exploration of trade-offs and synergies across different scenarios.

NaturaConnector provides a web-based interface that enables users to explore our prioritisation outputs interactively and to better understand the implications of alternative planning strategies. It allows users to compare different scenarios, adjust planning criteria, and visualise how priorities shift under different objectives, assumptions, and implications in terms of performance across a range of ecological, geographic and socio-economic indicators. To facilitate uptake and dissemination, the platform also includes a link to downloadable infosheets for 39 countries and 10 biogeographic regions. The infosheets showcase consensus prioritization outputs as well as an assessment of the performance of the spatial planning solutions with some key takeaways specific to each country or geographic region.

PriorityCheck is an online tool that enables users (stakeholders, practitioners, and experts) to engage directly with the prioritisation outputs, including querying the species and habitats composition at each site, and provide spatially explicit feedback to the research team on selected priority areas, regarding their implementation challenges, feasibility, and local relevance and value for conservation or restoration. Based on this spatially-explicit feedback entered by stakeholders and regional experts on PriorityCheck, we then further refined and improved the spatial prioritisation outputs.