The importance of economic costs in the development of guidelines for spatial conservation management

The paper analyses the efficient spatial allocation of subsidies for biodiv ersity-enhancing land use. For this purpose a spatial allocation model for two different regions is developed which allows guidelines to be derived on how to achieve the highest possible ecological benefit within a given budg et provided to support biodiversity-enhancing forms of land use. In contras t to other conservation biological models, our model includes more realisti c economic assumptions. The difference from economic models dealing with th e efficient spatial allocation of environmental goods is that the benefit f unction of our model is based on ecological theory. Therefore, our results differ from those obtained in monodisciplinary studies. In particular, with increasing marginal costs a more even allocation of resources becomes opti mal. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.