Towards a better understanding of protected-area management costs

Data on protected area (PA) management costs are essential for effective conservation planning and management. To be most useful, these data should be at high resolution, in terms of individual management units within PA systems and individual management actions. Ideally, data would also capture temporal changes in management costs in relation to disturbance events, and variations in biophysical and social context. Yet there remains no generally accepted method to collect these important high-resolution data. Here we present a new method for the collection of data on current management spending and the costs of managing PAs to explicit, and usually higher, standards than presently achieved. The method allows the gathering of data at higher spatial, temporal, and thematic resolution than has been achieved before. We highlight the strengths and potential pitfalls of this type of data collection and offer insights into how these data can be used for the benefit of PA managers, conservation planners, and policy-makers. The methods presented here could be adapted to be used by other PA management agencies and jurisdictions to better understand the costs of managing PAs effectively.