Understanding the value of social network data for conservation planning

In a new paper of ours (out online open access this week in Conservation Biology: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.13500) we show that the value of collecting new data on social networks to inform conservation planning depends on both species distributions and the structure of the social networks that drive the spread of conservation and other behaviours. When the distribution of species across sites is highly nested (i.e., when species poor sites are sub-sets of species rich sites) we find the value of collecting social network information is almost always low. On the other hand, the value of collecting social network information is higher the more centralised the social network is. The major contributions of this work are are new rules of thumb to strategically prioritise the collection of social network data to inform conservation planning interventions.

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