The value of information in reserve site selection

The reserve site selection problem is to select sites for the establishment of biological reserves with the goal to maximize the number of species con tained in the reserves. When species distributions are known, this correspo nds to the maximal coverage problem. In practice, knowledge of species dist ributions may be incomplete and only incidence probabilities are available. In this case, the goal is to maximize the expected number of species conta ined in the reserves. This is called the maximal expected coverage problem. This paper describes and illustrates a formal approach to assess the value of information, such as site surveys or species surveys, in this problem.