Although biodiversity is generally diminishing, in some areas its conservation is expanding. However; the exact path of this expansion is uncertain. This can lead to problems of path-dependence and lock-in effects. Path dependence describes situations where history strongly influences present decisions and lock-in effects refer to situations where an earlier decision provides strong incentives to follow a particular path, even if more efficient alternatives are available later on. We develop a conceptual ecological-economic model to investigate which ecological and economic parameters favour the appearance of efficiency losses in biodiversity conservation due to path dependence and lock-in effects in a dynamic two-period two-region model. Generally we find that efficiency losses occur if there are signals that guide the first-period budget into a region that later turns out to be suboptimal if both time periods had been considered right from the beginning. To illustrate the conservation relevance of our findings, we present potential efficiency losses through path dependence in the hypothetical case of applying offsets to conserving the endangered Maculinea teleius butterfly near the city of Landau in Germany.

中文翻译：

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由于锁定效应和路径依赖，动态世界中的生物多样性保护可能会导致效率低下

尽管生物多样性普遍减少，但在某些地区，其保护范围正在扩大。然而; 这种扩张的确切路径尚不确定。这会导致路径依赖和锁定效应的问题。路径依赖描述了历史强烈影响当前决策的情况，锁定效应是指较早的决定提供了强烈的激励以遵循特定路径的情况，即使以后有更有效的替代方案可用。我们开发了一个概念生态经济模型，以研究哪些生态和经济参数有利于在动态两期两区域模型中由于路径依赖和锁定效应而导致生物多样性保护效率损失的出现。一般来说，我们发现，如果有信号将第一阶段预算引导到一个区域，如果从一开始就正确考虑两个时间段，那么该区域后来证明是次优的，就会发生效率损失。为了说明我们的研究结果的保护相关性，我们在假设的情况下通过路径依赖来展示潜在的效率损失，该假设案例是在德国朗道市附近应用补偿保护濒临灭绝的 Maculinea teleius 蝴蝶。