In order to plan the conservation management of the biodiversity and of natural recourses in general, we must formulate specific and measurable goals to assess how effective such management is. It is not practical to define such goals for each component of the biodiversity and the ecosystem services derived from the ecological process, as this does not allow for an effective environmental management. Thus, it is necessary to select some surrogate items representing the conservation goals and the management situations that must be resolved to achieve them. In this sense, and as an initial step to review and fit its management plan to the whole territory, the West Andean protected areas subsystem (SAO) team selected those surrogate items and called them values of the conservation objects. The selection was done using the Landscape Species Approach to define a group of animals as umbrella, keystone andflagship species. We selected nine species: four carnivorous including two felids, as well as aquatic mammals, a bird, an ungulate, a primate, and a rodent. With this, we expected to come up with management plans based on the cooperation with all relevant stakeholders in the territory for an effective conservation effort aimed at consolidating the ecological structure of this subsystem. © 2019. Acad. Colomb. Cienc. Ex. Fis. Nat.