Ideally, ecological restoration and conservation projects require a number of important planning stages before they can be successfully implemented. In reality, however, these stages are often poorly incorporated, if at all. One of the critical stages in this process involves the establishment of conservation goals that are explicit, and therefore set a quantifiable benchmark. To date, such conservation objectives have typically been generic in nature, and fail to go beyond general landscape ecology principles (such as patch size and connectivity) that provide little direction for on-ground works, and no basis for quantitative evaluation. Here we present a restoration planning framework for the temperate regions of South Australia, that incorporates spatially-explicit information on land-use development history, predictive models of vegetation associations, and temporal assessments of species functional groups within landscapes. By determining the current and future dynamics of selected functional groups of flora and vertebrate fauna, and the factors that underpin these dynamics, realistic and explicit conservation objectives can be set. Such explicit goal-setting within real landscapes allows for conservation priorities to be set, as well as a robust mechanism for assessment and learning (true adaptive management). Furthermore, spatially-explicit conservation planning allows for biodiversity conservation and restoration to be incorporated into broader natural resource management frameworks.