A GIS-based policy support tool to determine national responsibilities and priorities for biodiversity conservation

provides the list of species used in the analyses and S4 File describes the performance and explains opportunities for optimization. Technical requirements. The NRA-Tool is a module that can be added to the ArcGIS Toolbox. It was developed in ArcGIS 10.x and C# [57] using Visual Studio 17 [58] with.NET 4.6.1 [59], ArcGIS runtime SDK for.NET [60], and ArcObjects SDK [61]. Files to be used with the NRA-Tool must be named according to the following convention: The species distribution file names must start with a lowercase “s” followed by a hyphen. After the hyphen, the name can be chosen freely (e.g., “s-vulpes_vulpes.shp” for the red fox). For (global) ecological units or reference areas, file names must start with a lowercase “g” followed by a hyphen (e.g., “g-biomes.shp” and “g-border_of_asia”). Focal area file names must start with a lowercase “f” followed by a hyphen (e.g., “f-asian_countries.shp”). Files not named according to these conventions will not be displayed and therefore will not be selectable in the tool. In ArcGIS, geodata should have a spatial reference if they are used for spatial analyses based on calculations of distance and area [51]. To avoid problems and erroneous results caused by incompatible projections, all input files for the NRA-Tool should use the same ArcGIS geore- ferencing and projection system. Generally, we recommend WGS84 for global analyses. Analy- ses on continental or smaller scales should be performed with more appropriate conformal area projections where polygon areas represent country areas. This is especially critical when

using the Polygon Area-Approach. Other sources of bias must be considered when using the NRA-Tool, including the use of different formats, and the spatial resolution of data [1, 36]. Accordingly, we recommend that users check the georeferencing, projections, and resolutions of the input shapefiles as well as the CPU, RAM, and disk space of their computer system prior to using the NRA-Tool. The computation times for national responsibility and conservation priority assessments are highly dependent on computer performance and are affected by the limitations of the oper- ating system and hardware, as well as the spatial data input. For example, when calculations were made for 58 countries and regions on an area-only basis (i.e., comparison of areas with- out considering the shape, spatial extent, and overlap of the different units of concern) using a laptop with a 1.8 GHz processor and 4 GB RAM, the total computation time for the analyses of national responsibility and conservation priority for one species (Cyornis rubeculoides) based on TErW [53] was approximately 8 seconds, and based on GEnZ [62] was approximately 50 seconds Despite the longer runtime, when using complex, high-resolution spatial and environ- mental data to compute distribution range data for many species, we recommend using the GEnZ shapefile downloadable from [62] and applying the methods in [36, 37]. This task is computationally demanding and the runtime may be many hours or even days, especially if the analyses consider the whole globe as the reference area.

Further development. In addition to the development and improvement of the ArcGIS tool, we have started the development of a similar tool as an extension for the Open Source GIS QGIS [63], which will be made available as Open Source in future. The Polygon Area- Approach currently only uses information about the range/extent of the species distributions and should be expanded to allow for the use of abundance data. Additionally, it might be possi- ble to integrate more options for particularly spatially-oriented conservation priority assess- ments with similar approaches, e.g. [31]. Availability of software and data. The NRA-Tool can be downloaded directly from [64, 65] or the interactive representation of the SCALES-project [66] called SCALETOOL [66–68]. The GEnZ can be found and downloaded from [62]. The publicly available species distribution dataset for selected shrew species is derived from IUCN Red List data and can be downloaded from [44] (not for commercial use). World continent data are available from ESRI [43], while PLOS ONE GIS-based policy support tool to determine national responsibilities for biodiversity conservation PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243135 December 3, 2020 13 / 23