ABSTRACT
One of the greatest challenges to protecting biodiversity in conservation areas is to reduce environmental and social threats. Typical threats to tropical forest environments include deforestation, unsustainable exploitation of forest resources, pollution and the spread of invasive species (Spangenberg, 2007). Conservation action requires clear perceptions of threats and effective ways of responding to them (Pressey and Bottrill, 2008). The identification and management of threats in conservation projects is, however, still weak (Hughes and Flintan, 2001; Pressey and Bottrill, 2008). There have been calls in the conservation literature to systematically compare threats and conservation actions to advance the understanding of the links between the human and natural world, particularly the protection of biodiversity (Salafsky and Margoluis, 1999; Margules and Pressey, 2000; Pressey and Bottrill, 2008; Sunderland et al., 2008).
