This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

I mean, what, like humans aren't going to have severe issues getting the resources they need no matter what?

Arrigh', so

I don't know beans from bean-counting, so this post in general is going to be vague, and anyone bringing the STATISTICS is welcome up ins.

For convenience's sake, we'd need to divvy up conservation management into a couple categories - namely, management which benefits an economically important taxa (pollinators like bumblebees, food species like fish, wild-type subspecies/cultivars of economically important crops for genetic diversity, plus an unknown factor in poorly-studied organisms which may have applications in the pharmaceutical industry), and economically unimportant taxa (taxa which humans feel a moral obligation to prevent the decline of, i.e. all the charismatic megafauna like pandas, tigers, elephants, rhinos, gray wolves, whales, kiwi, badgers, etc etc). The "unimportant" taxa, granted, do have benefits associated with their continued non-extinction, but I'll break that down when I break it down.

From some kind of standpoint which I suspect Stij or Wheat or the like could stick a label on, you need to consider conservation programmes like any other thing which costs resources. I'm not talking about hay for Przewalksi's horse being taken straight out of a domesticated beef cow's feedlot; I'm talking time, labour, land, and public attention. As well as money.

You then need to factor in the cost of all these things relative to the value gained from the management practice. In the case of a pest species that negatively impacts a species of low economic value (e.g. Kakapo, Kiwi, , you could quantify it as how much damage you've mitigated to the invaded ecological system, and the value of said ecological system. In New Zealand, eradicating rats from an offshore island will be expensive and time-consuming, but a full eradication gives you a place to cache populations of vulnerable species. Of course, the losses associated with an incomplete eradication are pretty drastic, so you need to be extremely thorough. Bigger islands can support larger populations but are tougher to properly clean out; islands more proximal to the mainland are cheaper to access and thus can be serviced more often, but the risk of recolonisation by the pest is higher. Economically unimportant pest eradication mostly feeds into benefits for economically unimportant taxa, so I'll explore the benefits accrued when I discuss the taxa saved by the pest management.

For vulnerable economically unimportant species, all the stuff you find in zoos and the like, the key difficulty in quantifying the cost to humanity of their extinction is trying to put a discrete monetary value on something that's value-based, in the more moral/ethical sense. Part of how ecologists quantify that is by focussing conservation efforts in a way that preserves as much biodiversity as possible. If you have two taxa, and only have the resources to prevent the extinction of one, the argument goes that you should pick the two that most thoroughly represent Earth's biodiversity. For example:

New Zealand invests more money into conservation than other countries, because we have a much longer history of geographic isolation and many of our terrestrial species are found nowhere else in the world. Two such (critically endangered) animals would be the Black Stilt (the world's rarest wading bird, probably no more than 120 individuals alive, survival in the wild is reliant on captive rearing of eggs), and the kakapo (128 individuals, restricted to offshore islands and requires humans to transport them around and pair them up properly to keep the population's genetic health up). If we had funding cuts and could only save one of these species, which is more worthwhile? Assuming for argument's sake that the projects cost the same amount for a similar amount of output in terms of birds saved, ecologists would look at the taxonomy.

Code:

Rank          Kakapo          (notes)                           | Kaki             (notes)

Order         Psittaciformes  (parrots)                         | Charadriiformes  (waders, gulls, and auks)
Superfamily   Strigipoidea    (Kea, Kaka, Kakapo, some fossils) | N/A
Family        Strigopidae     (One genus containing one species)| Recurvirostridae (avocets and stilts, three genera total, 9 species total)
Genus         Strigops        (kakapo, one species)             | Himantopus       (disputed taxonomy, but at least two species, maybe six)
Species       habroptilus                                       | novaezelandiae

Jesus that was a lot of spacebar mashing. Anyway. From this, you can see that if the kakapo were to go extinct, we'd lose a family's worth of biological diversity. In contrast, if the black stilt went extinct, its family and genus are both still represented by Himantopus himantopus, the black-winged stilt (of Least Concern as determined by the IUCN). Quantifying animals to figure out what's worth saving is calculating and shitty, but hey! Life's shitty. We can't dedicate 100% of our resources to preserving every single threatened species, and sometimes that means picking our battles.

So that's how scientists/conservation ecologists/management choose where and how to spend their limited funds. This process will also factor in all the other benefits accrued, like tourism and the good vibes and how much bird you'll get for your buck. The black stilt, for instance, is captive-reared, but adults are released back into the McKenzie Basin and are free to breed, and then the scientists'll come and pinch the eggs and raise the chicks/juveniles in fenced enclosures. Predation of adults does happen, but the cost of housing that many birds is impractical so they have to release adults back into the wild. The Kakapo may be the more taxonomically critical species to preserve, but its overall value is decreased because it's restricted to offshore islands, which can only be accessed by DOC rangers or scientists. They're not accessible to the public, and unless I got into that line of work I probably won't see one in the wild in my whole life. By contrast, the black stilts (on the mainland) can be seen by tourists at the captive breeding facility, and I was even lucky enough to see one with coloured ID bands out in the wild during my trip up to the basin.

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BUT that only covers critically endangered species! I'll get onto the economically important biodiversity management in a second post, but I'll respond to Clocktocks there.

For some taxa like cetaceans, certain birds, apes, there's certainly a less negotiable moral/ethical aspect to preserving the safety+culture of people who happen to be a different species, but I'll concur that we're likely to do a much better job of that when we sort out our shit as a collective species first.

What I will counter though is that there almost certainly are not enough resources on Earth to support our population. Western countries give developing countries shit for destroying forest, but we totally did that when we started on the route to an industrialised society. That's how we got the lucre! The Canterbury Plains, hell, the general areas of flat farmland east of the Southern Alps, that used to be the Canterbury mixed-podocarp forest! We can't tell countries like Indonesia or Brazil to stop cutting down forest because they're acting as carbon sinks to mitigate man-made global warming, but refuse to compensate them for said resource and deny them industry and economic independence. I really don't think, with our current technology, let alone mindset, that the Earth can support 7 billion people living a first-world middle class lifestyle, and we need to address that issue before telling subsistence farmers in the Congo to stop destroying the gorilla's habitat.