Designing Connected and Compact Nature Reserves

摘要

It is generally accepted that for many species, the ability to get around a reserve promotes their long-term persistence. Here, we measure the ease with which species can move by two spatial criteria: (i) the connectivity of the reserve, that is to say, the possibility to go through the whole reserve without leaving it, and (ii) the compactness of the reserve, that is to say, the remoteness of the sites in relation to each other, the distance between two sites being measured by the shortest distance to travel to get from one site to another without leaving the reserve. To protect the reserve of external disturbances, we also impose a connectivity constraint for the area outside the reserve. This article presents a method based on integer linear programming to define connected and compact reserves. Computational experiments carried out on artificial instances with 400 sites and 100 species are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.