Thank you for putting together a short but really thoughtful piece highlighting the key area principles to advance in the area-connectivity debate. This is a great "agree to disagree" paper, that can serve as the basis for setting effective conservation actions, and what's most important, to fix what we know to be beyond debate – which may be quite helpful in many debates with decision makers. I particularly like the "Putting disagreement into context", and I can foresee that this paper will be also a good resource for teaching. My congrats for that.

Perhaps the only thing I'm missing would be stressing a bit more the fact that in many (if not most) cases, applied conservation decisions are taken based on relatively limited information. That is, in the absence of high-quality information of minimum fragment size to maintain the populations and communities of the target groups (if there are any), or about which degree of connectivity would be enough to sustain them. So in the unavoidable presence of uncertainty about the results of conservation actions, area and connectivity stand out as key ecological principles so rooted in ecological theory and practice, that they should be part of the baseline of any decision. This is implicit in your text, and lack of data is mentioned, but to me it would be good to make it more explicit, reinforcing a bit more the need to rely on the three principles you list, as the basis to start with any planning exercise. This could be done by adding a short paragraph about dealing with stakeholders in the "Protecting biodiversity with people and for people", as a proper account of uncertainty should be part of the discussion with both stakeholders (whether local communities or large transnational corporations) and decision-makers. And there is no uncertainty about the need to apply your three principles (uncertainty may only be about the how, but never about the why).

It is a pity that the interpretation of your figure is not a bit more straightforward, although I concur it is difficult to make three concise images for relatively complex ideas. But although all in all they make their work together with the text, I find plates (1) and (2) of the figure relatively less informative than plate (3). Thus, consider the following two changes to the figure:
Plate 1. I've always found Olson's biomes too coarse to be useful for conservation planning. I won't advocate for a particular classification of ecoregions here, but I would find more illustrative if it also included the biogeographical realms… perhaps adding to the map the limits of the main biogeographical realms as in Olson et al. Bioscience 2001 would be helpful to this aim, including a reference to biogeographical differences… perhaps simply saying "protect habitat in every biome and ecoregion and biogeographical region" in the figure caption.
Plate 2. The figure shows a scenario of natural fragments, but not which fragments are protected. What about including a black contour line (either continuous or dashed) in some of them, the ones that would need to be protected in each one of the two biomes? By making the pattern of protected fragments different you will highlight better the need for, e.g., protecting more and more connected fragments in the more transformed blue biome.