摘要：Designing broad-scale conservation corridors has become increasingly common as a wayof conducting an assessment for achieving targets for the representation and persistence of nature. However,since many of these corridors must traverse agricultural and other production landscapes, planning andimplementation are not trivial tasks. Most approaches to conservation assessments in the dynamic worldof production landscapes are data-intensive and analytically complex. However, in the real world, donorand other external requirements impose time and budget constraints, and dictate strong stakeholderinvolvement in the entire planning process. In order to accommodate this, assessments must be rapid,cheap, and the approach and products must be comprehensible and acceptable to stakeholders. Here wedescribe such an assessment aimed at identifying and implementing a network of conservation corridorsin the Gouritz Initiative project domain of South Africa's Cape Floristic Region hotspot. We used empiricaldata and expert knowledge to identify a corridor network hypothesized to sustain key ecological andevolutionary processes. We also consulted experts to provide a spatially explicit assessment of theopportunity costs of conservation associated with agriculture, the predominant land use in the region. Weused these products to identify categories of land requiring different actions and instruments to achieveconservation goals, thereby moving from the "where" to the "how" of conservation. This information wasthen fed into the collaborative strategy development process for the Gouritz Initiative. Our discussionemphasizes the lessons that we learnt from undertaking this assessment, particularly lessons regarding theimplementation of the planning products. We conclude that at the outset of any planning project, a consensuson the vision must be achieved, a detailed social assessment of appropriate institutions must be undertaken,and a learning organization that practices adaptive comanagement should be established. These institutionaland governance requirements are fundamental to successful implementation of conservation-planningproducts
