Fig. 2: Impact of monitoring strategies on biodiversity protection.

a–c, Outcome of policies designed to minimize species loss based on different monitoring strategies: full recurrent monitoring (of species presence and abundance at each time step; a), citizen science recurrent monitoring (limited to species presence/absence with some error at each time step; b) and full initial monitoring (species presence and abundance only at the initial time; c). The results show the percentage change in species loss, total protected area, accumulated species value and phylogenetic diversity between a random protection policy (black polygons) and models optimized by CAPTAIN (blue polygons). All results are averaged across 250 simulations, with more details shown in Supplementary Table 3. Each simulation was based on the same budget and resolution of the protection units (5 × 5 cells) but differed in their initial natural system (species distributions, abundances, tolerances and phylogenetic relationships) and in the dynamics of climate change and disturbance patterns.