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Precision ecology for targeted conservation action

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 9, pages 1102–1111 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Addressing the coupled threats of catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss requires implementation of conservation and restoration actions globally. However, on-the-ground action is hindered by context dependency: the ubiquitous challenge that implementation outcomes vary from place to place due to complex dependencies among social and ecological drivers. Policymakers and practitioners recognize the need to tailor solutions to contexts, and target actions to places where they will work effectively. To provide information for decision-making, applied ecologists can learn from medicine and marketing, which aim to provide healthcare tailored to individual patients, and advertisements targeting individual tastes. These disciplines exploit big data and rapidly developing computational advances to predict treatment effects for individual units. Here we argue why and how ecological disciplines can begin to capitalize on these rich advances, to equip ecologists with a potentially powerful toolkit for applying big data to site-specific interventions, allowing effective conservation over large extents. We review approaches that hold promise for applied ecology, identify hurdles that must be overcome and propose a roadmap for establishing the conditions that will permit adoption of precision ecology.

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Fig. 1: ITEs can differ in magnitude and sign from the ATE.
Fig. 2: The principles of uplift modelling, used in marketing, apply also to ecology to identify currently unmanaged units that should or should not be targeted for a specific management intervention.

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Acknowledgements

R.S. and E.E.J. were funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) project ‘Transferable Ecology for a changing world (TREE)’ (NERC reference: NE/X009998/1). E.G. acknowledges funding from an NERC Research Programme Fellowship provided through the UKRI Landscape Decisions Programme (NE/V007831/1). J.M.B. was funded by NERC-funded project ‘Trustworthy and Accountable Decision-Support Frameworks for Biodiversity - A Virtual Labs based Approach’ (NE/X002233/1). R.S. thanks I. J. Dahabreh and L. Evans for informative discussion of concepts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Rebecca Spake & Eleanor E. Jackson

  2. School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Rebecca Spake

  3. Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Eleanor E. Jackson

  4. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, UK

    James M. Bullock & Emma Gardner

  5. Department of Statistics and Data Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Elizabeth Tipton

  6. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Norway

    Matthew J. Grainger

  7. School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    C. Patrick Doncaster

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  1. Rebecca Spake
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  4. Emma Gardner
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Contributions

R.S. conceived the idea and developed a first draft with C.P.D. Contributions from E.E.J., J.M.B., E.G., E.T. and M.J.G. substantially developed ideas and content in manuscript iterations.

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Correspondence to Rebecca Spake.

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Spake, R., Jackson, E.E., Bullock, J.M. et al. Precision ecology for targeted conservation action. Nat Ecol Evol 9, 1102–1111 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02733-4

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