Understanding the Tradeoffs Between Site Quality and Species Presence in Reserve Site Selection

摘要

A number of optimization models have been developed for natural reserve design and reserve site selection. The most common approach seeks to maximize the number of individual species that occur among chosen sites. A number of heuristics and mathematical programming algortihms have been applied to solve this problem. Although attaining maximum overall species representation is important, the relative quality of representation [which could be affected by site attributes such as habitat value, adequate population size, presence of critical resources, existence (or lack thereof) of exotic competitors, etc.] has been absent from most representation models.