Biodiversity designations represent the sites or regions that have been identified as important for biodiversity conservation due to their biological uniqueness or the high threat that they face. A plethora of different approaches have been promoted by conservation organisations and researchers in order to guide decisions about where to invest in biodiversity conservation. These approaches use globally consistent criteria and available data in order to identify and classify sites. The designations themselves do not confer protected area status, but many of the sites identified may partly or fully overlap with a protected area designation on-ground. Biodiversity designations can be defined at a site-scale or a larger regional-scale and have thus been sub-divided on this basis.