Lichen species connected to aspen depend on different stages of succession and consequently, to promote such lichens and other organisms favored by aspen trees, a landscape should consist of forests of different ages with a continuous aspen regeneration. We thank Jan Andersson, Håkan Blomqvist, Thomas P. Johansson, Bengt Norberg, Magnus Persson, Nils Erik Pettersson, Ulf Stäring and Per Simonsson at SCA, and Bo Magnusson and

Gunnar Selling at the Swedish Forest Agency who helped us find suitable sites and gave us access to maps, etc. Ulf Arup for help with identification of some Caloplaca species and Christian selleck chemicals llc Printzen for help with determining Lecidea sphaerella; Karin Öhman, Sebastian Sundberg and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on the manuscript. This work Liver X Receptor agonist was financially supported by the Swedish Research Council Formas (Grants 230-2006-351 and 215-2009-569 to LG). “
“The importance of cost-effectiveness in conservation planning and implementation has grown (Bottrill et al., 2008, Ferraro and Pattanayak,

2006 and Murdoch et al., 2007), reflecting the current pressures on biodiversity and a realization that all species that require conservation investments simply cannot be helped with today’s levels of conservation spending. Since there is a trade-off between money spent on collecting data and money used for actual conservation action, finding the appropriate level for biodiversity Astemizole surveys is an important step in conservation planning. Hitherto, conservation planning studies commonly have been made at a landscape or national scale. Studies at small scales like forest management units, stands and individual trees are not as common (but see Perhans et al. 2011). Conducting biodiversity surveys to decide where and how to invest in different types of conservation actions is normally regarded as one of the first stages in a systematic conservation planning process (Margules and Pressey 2000). Yet, whether or not to

survey and how thorough surveys should be are challenging questions (Possingham et al. 2007). A few studies address these questions by comparing survey benefits and costs. Balmford and Gaston (1999) argue that biodiversity surveys prior to decisions on where to locate new reserves generally allow the selection of fewer, or smaller, areas because the survey data allow selection of areas that complement each other in terms of the conservation features they contain. The cost-effectiveness of surveys depends on this saving in protected area in addition to the costs of land acquisition and maintenance. They suggest that the break-even survey cost is large enough in both developed and undeveloped countries to make surveys cost-effective in a wide range of applications. Grantham et al.