Resources for biodiversity conservation are severely limited, requiring strategic investment. Benefits exceeded costs in some areas, with carbon storage dominating the ecosystem support values and swamping opportunity costs. Other benefits associated with conservation were more modest and exceeded costs only in guarded areas and indigenous reserves. We used this cost-benefit information to show that one potential corridor between two large forest patches had net benefits that were three times greater than two otherwise similar alternatives. Spatial cost-benefit analysis can powerfully inform conservation planning, even though the availability of relevant data may be limited, as was the case in our study area. It can help us understand the synergies between biodiversity conservation and economic development when the two are indeed aligned and to clearly understand the trade-offs when they are not. Introduction Opportunities in biodiversity conservation must be strategically allocated, because resources are severely limited [1]. As a result, approaches for designing conservation plans that systematically represent a region’s biodiversity have proliferated and become ever more sophisticated [2,3]. Although the biological aspects of these approaches have advanced rapidly, relatively little attention has been paid to the economic side of conservation planning (i.e., the science of systematically prioritizing conservation interventions), even though planning invariably involves both costs and benefits. Understanding costs including land prices, management costs, and opportunity costs (i.e., foregone alternatives)will help us to allocate scarce dollars most efficiently [4]. And understanding benefitsecosystem services such as flood control from wetlands and carbon sequestration buy 24168-96-5 from forestswill help us to estimate the economic value of lands identified for conservation and to identify who may be willing to pay for these services [5]. Cost-benefit analyses, where the economic costs and benefits of a proposed policy or project are tallied and used to inform decision making, are widely used in a variety of issue areas, including the health, safety, transport, and development sectors [6]. These analyses can indicate whether the aggregate benefits of a policy decision outweigh the aggregate costs, and they can help quantify the resulting economic gains and losses among groups. Such information can be crucial in making efficient decisions about how to best allocate scarce resources in pursuit of various policy objectives [6]. Conservation biologists have been buy 24168-96-5 slow to incorporate these cost-benefit approaches into their work [7,8], but some recent studies demonstrate the potential power of economics to inform conservation decisions. On the costs side, economists have shown that conservation plans that incorporate costs can represent equal or greater levels of biodiversity with dramatically fewer resources than plans that do not consider costs [9C12]. Global-scale analyses have illustrated that the costs needed to establish and manage guarded areas vary enormously among countries [13]. Recent calls for more work on the SRSF2 costs of conservation indicate that these findings are slowly penetrating the planning literature [4,14]. On the benefits side, there has been an increased awareness of the economic value of ecosystem services provided by natural systems [5,15]. Quantifying these values, however, remains complex and has become a major area of research in both environmental and ecological economics [16,17]. New techniques have led to a much greater ability to quantify economic values associated buy 24168-96-5 with natural ecosystems in a wide variety of contexts [18,19]. Paralleling this research on valuation has been an increased interest in developing mechanisms that compensate landowners for the ecosystem services their lands provide [20,21]. Despite these advances, explicit analyses of economic costs and benefits have yet to become widely incorporated into conservation planning exercises. In part, this is because conservation planning is usually inherently spatial and thus presents special challenges for the quantification of both costs and benefits. For costs, spatially explicit data on land prices at the necessary resolution are lacking for many parts of the world, in which case they must be modeled [22,23]. For benefits, the biophysical delivery buy 24168-96-5 of ecosystem goods and services must first be spatially quantified, a difficult task in itself [24,25], and then these ecosystem services must be assigned an economic value in a spatially explicit manner. This requires knowledge of who the beneficiaries are, where they reside, how they perceive the value provided by an individual ecosystem service, and how the spatial pattern and scale of an ecosystem support affects the resulting economic.