R. Church et al., Understanding the tradeoffs between site quality and species presence in reserve site selection, FOREST SCI, 46(2), 2000, pp. 157-167
A number of optimization models have been developed for natural reserve des
ign 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 algorithms have been applied to so
lve this problem. Although attaining maximum overall species representation
is important, the relative quality of representation [which could be affec
ted by site attributes such as habitat value, adequate population size, pre
sence of critical resources, existence (or lack thereof) of exotic competit
ors, etc.] has been absent from most representation models. Yet issues of s
ite quality should be considered in order to have any assurance of long-ter
m species persistence in a reserve system. Here we present a multiobjective
optimization model that addresses the issue of balancing species presence
with habitat quality. One type of interesting alternative yields more high
quality representation at the price of some reduction in overall representa
tion. We present an application using a large dataset from California Gap A
nalysis to demonstrate this and other tradeoffs. Optimal solutions are atta
ined using commercial integer programming software with very reasonable com
putational effort.