1. Effective biodiversity conservation requires responding to threats in a timely fashion. This requires understanding the impacts of threats on biodiversity and when management needs to be implemented. However, most ecological systems face multiple threats, so monitoring to assess their impacts on biodiversity is a complex task. Indicators help simplify the challenge of monitoring but choosing the best indicator(s) to inform management is not straightforward.
2. We provide a decision framework that can help identify optimal indicators to trigger management in a system faced with multiple threats. The approach evaluates indicators based on criteria spanning monitoring efficiency, management outcomes and the economic constraints for decision‐making. Critical decision factors (or parameters) are identified and detailed in a six‐step process to estimate the cost‐effectiveness of alternate indicators, including threat impacts, sensitivity of indicators to detect change, and the benefits, costs and feasibility of alternative indicators and management actions.
3. Using the Kimberley as a case study, we evaluate 18 indicators for informing management of three key threats in the region: fire and grazing, feral cat predation, and weeds. We show that indicator selection based on our approach can help improve the expected outcome of management decisions under limited resources. By accounting for multiple factors in estimating benefit and costs of monitoring, our approach improves on common approaches that select indicators based only on whether they are sensitive to change and/or cheap to monitor. We also identify how uncertainty in decision factors influences indicator selection.
4. Although cost‐effectiveness analyses are gaining popularity, ours is the first study to integrate multiple selection criteria using a return on investment framework to compare indicators for monitoring multiple threats and triggering management.

中文翻译：

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如何选择具有成本效益的指标来触发保护决策？

1. 有效的生物多样性保护要求及时应对威胁。这需要了解威胁对生物多样性的影响以及何时需要实施管理。但是，大多数生态系统面临多种威胁，因此进行监测以评估其对生物多样性的影响是一项复杂的任务。指标有助于简化监视的挑战，但是选择最佳指标来告知管理人员并非易事。
2. 我们提供了一个决策框架，可以帮助您确定最佳指标，以在面临多种威胁的系统中触发管理。该方法基于跨越监控效率，管理成果和决策的经济约束条件的标准来评估指标。确定关键决策因素（或参数）并在六步过程中进行详细描述，以评估替代指标的成本效益，包括威胁影响，指标检测变化的敏感性以及替代指标和管理的收益，成本和可行性动作。
3. 以金伯利案例研究为基础，我们评估了18个指标，用于告知该地区三个主要威胁的管理信息：火灾和放牧，野猫捕食和杂草。我们表明基于我们的方法的指标选择可以帮助改善在有限资源下的管理决策的预期结果。通过考虑多个因素来估计监测的收益和成本，我们的方法改进了仅基于指标是否对变化敏感和/或监测便宜的指标来选择指标的通用方法。我们还确定了决策因素的不确定性如何影响指标的选择。
4. 尽管成本效益分析越来越流行，但我们的研究是第一项使用投资回报率框架来比较多个选择标准以比较监视多个威胁并触发管理的指标的研究。