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  • Biodiversity knowledge products are compiled and maintained in diverse ways, with multiple phases of data collection and processing, each associated with a cost (Fig 1). Typically, primary biodiversity data, which underpin the knowledge products, go through several stages of data collation, compilation, validation, and quality control before knowledge products are made available to the wider community and general public in various forms (databases, spatial data, assessments, indicators, web services, publications, etc. ). Figure data removed from full text. Figure identifier and caption: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160640.g001 Different stages of knowledge generation and dissemination covered by the four knowledge products for which costs are included in this review.The coloured bars show which stages are covered by each knowledge product currently which were costed in the study. In 2013 only IBAs, AZE and KBAs identified through CEPF hotspot ecosystem profiling processes cover stages 4, 5 and 7.The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems will cover stages 4 and 7 in the near future; an extensive list of technical resources is available at www.iucnredlistofecosystems.org but no spatial data or indicators are yet available. Here, we focus on the costs of the secondary processes that are directly and completely devoted to the delivery of the knowledge products (see Table 2 and S3 Table). We do not include the costs of collection of primary data [37] which, while essential for the delivery of the knowledge product, precede work on the knowledge products themselves and are not exclusive to them. The most obvious example of primary cost is gathering data in the field. For example, we did not include the costs of establishing, mapping, digitizing, and maintaining national databases of protected areas or the cost of surveying, classifying and mapping ecosystems for the Red List of Ecosystems; rather we included the costs of aggregating these data centrally through workshops and direct contact with governmental protected area agencies, and subsequent quality checking and revision before making them available online. Similarly, for The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, we did not include the costs of establishing, digitizing and maintaining specimen locality databases. We also excluded the costs of maintaining networks supporting data collection such as the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC) network of Specialist Groups and Red List Authorities which support The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; the network of BirdLife Partners worldwide who lead identification and monitoring of Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (the subset of KBAs identified using data for birds [26]; or the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (IUCN WCPA) network supporting the development of the WDPA. Table data removed from full text. Table identifier and caption: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160640.t002 Categories, subcategories and funding sources classification used to categorise costs. These processes are important for numerous reasons and applications above and beyond the delivery of biodiversity and conservation knowledge products, and so including their costs here would inflate our estimates inappropriately. However, it must be emphasized that these processes, worth many millions of dollars per year (see, e.g., [38], [39]) and are critical to proper establishment, development and ongoing maintenance of knowledge products. Therefore, the costs reported herein for knowledge product delivery represent a fraction of the total cost to populate knowledge products with data (e.g. Fig 1, stage 1). Similarly, we did not assess the costs or benefits that result from use of knowledge products which are typically incurred by end-users of the information (e.g., conservation actions such as protected area establishment and management, interventions for threatened species, changes to land use policies, etc. ). Finally, we excluded the costs of national assessments which follow national standards, such as national red lists of species or designating and delineating new protected areas. Some national species assessments, for example, do contribute to the global IUCN Red Lists of Threatened Species and Ecosystems when a nationally endemic species or ecosystem type is assessed using the IUCN Categories and Criteria and the data are shared with IUCN [40, 27], but the processes and costs of generating a national red list usually occur and are borne independently of the global IUCN Red Lists [25, 41]. Data collection for this review was undertaken from August 2013 to November 2014. We obtained and collated costs of: 1) developing and maintaining knowledge products from the earliest year for which data on costs were available (for each product) up until December 2013; 2) annual costs of maintaining data, structures, and processes in 2013; and 3) projected future expenditure to achieve pre-defined baselines by 2020. To compile the past, present and future costs in a standardised way we classified costs by knowledge product stage, cost type, and funding source (Table 2). We contacted individuals who manage or have managed knowledge product development processes (henceforth referred to as study data providers), and asked them to provide the relevant cost data. A spreadsheet with options and specific instructions were created for collection of data in a standardised way, to facilitate subsequent analyses. The spreadsheet included drop-down lists and free-text fields which allowed study data providers to classify each cost under each of the pre-defined expenditure categories and subcategories, and funding sources. Study data providers were requested to provide minimum and maximum estimates where precise values were not known, currency and year of currency, and minimum and maximum volunteer time invested. All files received were then merged into a single database which included all costs collected for each of the four knowledge products. Finally, to account for inflation and standardise estimates, all costs were converted to 2014 US$ (see S1 Table). We anticipated that we would be unable to obtain complete data on all of the past costs for each knowledge product (particularly for processes and components dating from further in the past). While the origins of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species date back to the early 1960s [42], very little information was available on the costs of development of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species methodology and infrastructure prior to 1999, except for the costs of assessing all birds globally, which date from 1985. Similarly, we compiled the costs associated with the establishment of Protected Planet since 1981, when the first digital version of the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA)–the database underpinning Protected Planet since 2008 –was created. However, the history of the WDPA goes back to 1959, when the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Council called for a list of national parks and equivalent reserves in their natural state (Resolution 713 (XXVIII)), which was then developed with considerable support from the IUCN WCPA network. Therefore, the financial and voluntary contributions from IUCN WCPA to the development and compilation of protected areas information before the establishment of a digital database on protected areas were not accounted for. To estimate the total funds invested in knowledge products until 2013, we compared the number of units of assessment for which we obtained cost estimates (e.g., species in The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species with a known assessment cost) with the total number of assessment units in the database (e.g. total number of species on The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) in December 2013 and scaled the total cost estimate proportionately (see Table 3). This assumes that the volume of available data for compilation, standards, methods and effort involved in assessments did not change through time. This is not the case especially for species assessments where the methods applied were different as the system used for assessing risk for extinction of species was updated in 1994. It is therefore likely that this have led to some under-estimation of earlier costs due to changes in criteria and increasing rigour in standards of assessment and documentation. Table data removed from full text. Table identifier and caption: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160640.t003 Summary of data collection for all four knowledge products.The table summarises which costs were collected for each of the four knowledge products and how much of the total number of assesments, available in December 2013, these represent. In cases where 100% of the costs were not collected, the total sum for each knowledge product was increased propotionally to reach 100%. 1The dataset assessed was all species published on www.iucnredlist.org by the end of 2013 including re-assessments.2The dataset assessed was the December 2013 version of World Database on Protected Areas.3The dataset assessed was the World Birds and Biodiversity Database.4The dataset assessed was all ecosystem assessments completed or about to be completed by end of 2013. Our data comprised 875 cost records for all four knowledge products sourced from 11 study data providers (Table 3). As anticipated, this does not represent 100% of the costs for each knowledge product (Table 3). However, we covered the costs for conducting 76,068 species assessments (relating to 39,533 species, some of them assessed multiple times) between 1985 and 2013. This represented 68% of species assessments on The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as of December 2013, hence we proportionately rescaled the cost to match 100% of the species. Similarly, our data for KBAs from 1979–2013 accounted for 88% of existing KBAs, and we rescaled the cost to represent 100% of exisiting sites. Aside from the important exclusions outlined in these Methods–notably the exclusion of primary data generation and compilation costs by national agencies–all of the secondary known costs associated with producing Protected Planet and the global IUCN Red List of Ecosystems were collected, so these were not increased other than by adjusting all the costs to account for inflation. Voluntary time (including time donated to knowledge product delivery that is paid for by other institutions, universities, museums, governments, departments and NGOs) plays a crucial role in the production of biodiversity information. For example, more than ten thousand individuals through the IUCN Commissions and many more outside the Commissions, have provided voluntary input to the delivery of knowledge products [7]. These range from individuals compiling information to experts participating in workshops, reviewing assessments, providing data, and contributing to technical committees or governing bodies. Here, we recorded volunteer time invested in each knowledge product in terms of the number of working days (one working day equalling eight hours) and considering 240 working days per year (52 weeks per year minus four weeks of holidays at five working days per week). In many instances (if not most), because it was not an official requirement in project management, volunteer time invested had not even been accounted for or was not consistently recorded, making it difficult to apply a valid method. For these reasons we are likely to have underestimated substantially the total extent of volunteer time invested. We acknowledge that our estimates are uncertain, do not necessarily reflect the variation in any given process, and in some instances they may only capture a small subset of the input invested into assessments. For example, for amphibian assessments on the IUCN Red List considered in this paper, the estimate of volunteer time is solely based on workshop participation from 2001–2004 (see S2 Table and S3 Table); however, as mentioned above, this is just one form of input volunteers contribute to assessments, and it does not capture the full range of work required for these processes. Acknowledging the complexity of measuring the value of volunteer time, Salamon et al. [43] recommend the use of the replacement cost method which estimates the value of the work that the volunteer performs based on market wages. The enormous variation in expertise, experience, and geographic location of individuals providing it makes assiging a monetary value to the time invested by volunteers in the development and maintanance of biodiversity knowledge products highly complex. Nevertheless, we assigned a value to volunteer time using a higher and lower estimate attempting to assign a financial value to the known volunteer contributions based on different levels of experience and expertise. The higher estimate was US$30.97 per hour, which is the mean hourly rate of a conservation scientist according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [44]. The lower estimate is US$23.07 per hour, a generic volunteer time estimate provided by Independent Sector [45]. Two levels of uncertainty are incorporated through this approach. First, the uncertainty reflected in the maximun and minimum working days assigned in each estimate. Second, uncertainty on the monetary value assigned to those estimates. Reaching pre-defined baselines by 2020: For each knowledge product we estimated: 1) annual maintenance costs for each year until 2020, considering inflation and annual incremental costs; 2) additional one-off costs required to reach stated target ‘baselines’ by 2020 (e.g., additional investment to improve infrastructure, new assessments to be undertaken, updating old assessments). We did this by drawing from information compiled from past and annual costs of knowledge products, plus additional future projections documented by the study data providers, specifically: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: we followed Stuart et al. [30] who propose the assessment of 160,000 species based on a “subset of species broadly representative of biodiversity as a whole”, including sampled assessments for selected groups [46], to enable better conservation and policy decisions at a global level.Protected Planet: We assessed the costs of implementing the Protected Planet strategy by 2020. This includes re-structuring the Protected Planet website to improve data dissemination, expanding the scope of the WDPA to record information on “other effective area-based conservation measures” [47], integrating the Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness [48], and enhancing interoperability with other relevant datasets such as the other knowledge products discussed here.The World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas: We assessed the costs of expanding the KBA dataset, documenting existing KBAs for other taxonomic groups and criteria, and the predicted costs of a governance structure to manage the KBA program in the future. Two global networks of KBAs have been systematically identified to date: c. 12,800 Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas derived from bird data (IBAs; [49], [26]) and 587 Alliance for Zero Extinction sites derived from data for mammals, birds, a small sample of selected reptiles, conifers, reef-building corals, and amphibians (AZEs; [50]). In regions where KBAs have been identified for multiple taxonomic groups [51], IBAs comprised 68% of all KBAs identified [26]. We used this percentage to extrapolate from the total number of recognised IBAs to the potential total number of KBAs that may be identified globally, although we recognise that IBA density varies in different regions of the world, e.g. higher in Europe and lower in Australia [52]. We then assessed the costs of identifying these new sites, the costs of documenting all existing sites for a wider range of taxa and under new criteria in the forthcoming KBA standard [53] drawing from the known costs of similar processes [54]. This approach is likely to result in an underestimate because IBAs are likely to contribute a smaller proportion of all KBAs, especially in freshwater [55] and marine ecosystems [56]. Moreover, the identification of KBAs for multiple taxonomic groups (see [51] and references therein), although based on the best available data at the time, has only covered a subsample of plant and invertebrate groups.IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: Although there is a stated aim to complete the global IUCN Red List of Ecosystems by 2025 [57], including assessment of all terrestrial, freshwater, marine and subterranean ecosystems worldwide, for the purposes of alignment and comparability in our study, we regarded completion of the first global IUCN Red List of Ecosystems by 2020 as a pre-defined baseline. Indeed, if all the resources and capacity required (as estimated in our study) were to be made available in good time, the original 2025 target [57] could be achieved earlier. We estimated the costs for reaching this endpoint based on the costs of managing and upscaling assessment processes that are underway and the predicted cost of establishing and managing an online database for a global IUCN Red List of Ecosystems and putting in place governance structures and training programmes. Further information about how the projections were calculated is available in S2 Table.
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