Connectivity in priority area selection for conservation

Abstract

The spatial relations of sites within networks of priority areas for conservation is critical to the long-term maintenance of key genetic, population and ecosystem processes. However, these relations have received relatively little attention in the development of mathematical methods for objectively identifying such networks. Here we present a novel heuristic for incorporating connectivity explicitly as part of the model constraints, provide an integer linear programming formulation for the same problem, describe an integer cutting procedure which defines a sequence of non-decreasing lower bounds on the optimal solution and report the results of some computational experiments using these algorithms.

A graph theory approach for designing conservation reserve networks with minimal fragmentation

“…30 for a quadratic IP formulation). Structural contiguity has been addressed by Diamond and Wright [16], Cova and Church [12], Williams [39], and Shirabe [34] in the context of land allocation, and recently by Cerdeira et al [8] and Önal and Briers [28] in the context of conservation reserve selection (also see Ref. 22 for a hybrid heuristic approach).…”

“…They determined minimum spanning trees by a node and arc removal procedure to evaluate the degree of landscape connectivity and assess the relative importance of individual sites in terms of overall habitat connectivity. Recently, several optimization studies employed a similar graph construct to determine minimal contiguous reserves [8,27,28,34,39]. The present study also uses this approach in the model formulation.…”

A landscape index of ecological integrity to inform landscape conservation

“…Important questions about the various approaches persist and include the appropriate type or level of diversity on which to focus (e.g., individual species, biotic communities, ecological systems, or geophysical settings), the criteria by which areas should be selected, specific protocols for optimizing reserve selection,and the amount of protected area needed to achieve conservation goals. Over time, focus has shifted from isolated reserves to interconnected reserve networks selected based on landscape ecology principles (e.g., Soulé & Terborgh 1999;Briers 2002;Cerdeira et al 2005;Beier 2012), and from single species to multi-species and, more recently, ecosystem-and geophysical-based approaches that seek to conserve "nature's stage" (e.g., Hunter et al 1988;Noss 1996;Pickett et 50 al. 1992;Anderson and Ferree 2010;Beier et al 2015;Wurtzebach and Schultz 2016).…”

Designing a multi-species spatially explicit nature reserve network construction framework based on extinction probability: A case study of Wuyishan city

“…In recent years, a broad range of approaches has been proposed to accommodate spatial consideration in reserve selection. These approaches deal with some spatial design criteria as either constraints or objectives, such as performing adjacent rule (Lombard et al, 1997;Briers, 2002;Fuller et al, 2006;Zafra-Calvo et al, 2010), minimizing the boundary length or a linear combination of boundary length and total reserve area (Fischer and Church, 2003;Onal and Briers, 2003;McDonnell et al, 2002;Cabeza et al, 2004a), minimizing the maximum intersite distance or the sum of pairwise distances between all planning sites (Onal and Briers, 2002), measuring the total distance between neighboring sites (Onal and Briers, 2005;Onal and Wang, 2008) and the summed distance to mandatory sites (Alagador and Cerdeira, 2007), maximizing the sum of the inverse distances between pairs of sites (Rothley, 1999), enforcing buffers surrounding selected critical sites (Williams and ReVelle, 1998), keeping sites occurring within the stated proximity distance or the dispersal range of species (Briers, 2002;Van Langevelde et al, 2002;Williams, 2008;Cerdeira et al, 2010) and maximizing connectivity (Briers, 2002;Siitonen et al, 2003;Van Langevelde et al, 2002;Cerdeira et al, 2005;Fuller et al, 2006;Onal and Briers, 2006;Moilanen and Cabeza, 2002;Cabeza, 2003;Moilanen et al, 2005;Van Teeffelen et al, 2006;Rayfield et al, 2009;Bauer et al, 2010). By doing so, selected reserve networks are assumed to capture the optimal configurations that will ensure species' long-term survival while satisfying defined representation goals.…”