Habitat protection is key for conservation biology but that helps against local effects, considering global effects, other strategies more proactive can be applied. Like:

Stablishing a census, biobanking of delicate, endemic or endangered species genetic material. Repopulation of affected areas and elimination of foreign species.

I hope you fin this helpful.

Habitat protection only protects a tiny percentage of land in any country. The vast majority of biodiversity exists outside those protected areas.On top of that, traditional habitat protection often comes with a host of social problems, the main one being relocation of communities and excluding poor communities from making a living. For poor rural communities around the world, a significant portion of their livelihood comes from their surroundings, and traditional exclusionist policies in the name of conservation have impoverished already disenfranchised communities.

So conservationists are aiming towards working together with landowners and other stakeholders to achieve conservation objectives in working landscapes.

I suggest you have a look at the Biodiversity Stewardship Programme in South Africa, as well as many projects supported by WWF and the Nature Conservancy around the world, which work outside of protected areas. The biodiversity stewardship programme is an official government programme to work with landowners to protect biodiversity while continuing operations.

http://www.wwf.org.za/what_we_do/land/our_partners/stewardship2/

http://www.wwf.org.za/what_we_do/land/our_partners/stewardship2/better_land_management2/enkangala_grasslands_programme/

Also, there is a wealth of environmental and biodiversity legislation in various countries around the world, which requires environmental impact assessment assessments, mitigation and rehabilitation.

Spatial development plans and environmental management frameworks are also policies which seek to incorporate a range of economic, social and environmental objectives into large-scale policy and planning (such as defining zones of different development within a district). These policies, when properly implemented, make incorporating biodiversity conservation into economic planning much easier, for example by restricting certain types of activity within certain "low impact" zones. So a low impact zone may have activities like agriculture and some types of small businesses allowed, while a high impact zone might be set aside for heavy industry or for dense residential development.

Of course, one of the issues with these plans is that they are not always followed.

Conservation planning (C-Plans) by conservation authorities can also help to guide environmental impact assessments by defining "no-go" areas where certain activities will not be allowed. In my experience, they look great on paper but don't make a huge difference to development.

Ultimately, the key approach to conserving biodiversity outside protected areas is getting stakeholders on your side. And there are many tools that can be used to make sure that all parties voices have been heard and that their objectives have been considered. And once you have that, you can guide conservation and development planning much better.

Interesting to hear Malaysia started with habitat protection prior to species protection. In many countries (Europe, Africa) statutory species protection preceded habitat (area) protection by gazetting protected areas (NP). Moreover habitat (NP) protection provides for control of some threats (e.g. farming and forestry), but never all; mining has statutorily dominance over other land uses in most countries ( e.g. Namibia; Germany).

On the responses, I wish "stakeholders" would be more specific. Ownership of land, and associated (or not) wildlife and plants would need to be made explicit for conservation to be successfully ( attached).

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Hein, interesting papers. Look forward to reading them.

Stakeholders, by definition, is very broad, because it includes huge sectors of society far beyond just those who own the land or have an interest in the land. Someone can be a stakeholder in an ecosystem thousands of kilometers away if their water supply comes from that ecosystem. Likewise, coastal fishermen can be stakeholders in events half an ocean away (for example, in the case of sardines). And people can be stakeholders because they care. There are a bunch of people around the world who are stakeholders in a tiny park in Africa, because they have en emotional investment in the future of that park. The park has a value to them that cannot be quantified, and their lives will be the poorer for knowing that the park has been destroyed and they will never be able to see the mountain gorilla (or whatever) in its natural habitat. governments are stakeholders because they drive policy and have to allocate budgets. Businesses are stakeholders because policies affect the way they do business (for example, restricting certain economic activities in certain geographic regions comes with an opportunity cost).

But coming to your second point - I agree, having a baseline knowledge of the socio-economic and ecological system, the ownership and the species is pretty crucial for successful conservation strategies.

Thank you everyone for your valuable comments. I am delighted to see some perspectives on socio-economical, operational aspects of conservation even though I was anticipating answers stressing more on the biological aspects of conservation.

I asked this question because conservation of plant in Malaysia seems to be limited to habitat protection as shown in our National Biological Diversity Policy, they could suffer from 'pseudo-conservation' as McCauley et al. highlighted in "Pushing back against paper-park pushers".

As mentioned by Alan that protected area do not represent all habitat equally in his first comment, lowland habitats in Malaysia typically lacks representation in protected network probably because they are more populated than remote highlands, and my literature search on plant species conservation so far reveals very limited number of studies even for those in protected highlands, which are more susceptible to climate change and disturbance. Coupled with stories about the demise of some rare plant species I hear around my network, I think this could be a sign of 'pseudo-conservation'.

Hein, animal species protection probably precedes habitat protection in Malaysia, and we have quite a few ex situ conservation centers for the "charismatic mega-verterbrates", however for plant conservation, I can only manage to find sparse scientific work (mostly systematics, genetic diversity and propagation) on few economic species, and most of them are not too threatened (not CR and EN). Recent degazettement of parts of a watershed forest reserve (and a few more to come) for major highway construction have shown how fragile this system of protection is for plant species (the developer claims some efforts to relocate fauna and planning of animal passes, which probably already is a breakthrough for our country).

I worried and wondered how our conservation of plant can go from here.