Prioritizing multiple-use landscapes for conservation: methods for large multi-species planning problems

Abstract

Across large parts of the world, wildlife has to coexist with human activity in highly modified and fragmented landscapes. Combining concepts from population viability analysis and spatial reserve design, this study develops efficient quantitative methods for identifying conservation core areas at large, even national or continental scales. The proposed methods emphasize long-term population persistence, are applicable to both fragmented and natural landscape structures, and produce a hierarchical zonation of regional conservation priority. The methods are applied to both observational data for threatened butterflies at the scale of Britain and modelled probability of occurrence surfaces for indicator species in part of Australia. In both cases, priority landscapes important for conservation management are identified.

Optimizing resiliency of reserve networks to climate change: multispecies conservation planning in the Pacific Northwest, USA

“…We identify reserve networks that optimize habitat representation for a large suite of species using the software ZONATION (Moilanen et al, 2005). We demonstrate new methods of addressing uncertainty between climate projections, integrating climate data with other habitat variables, and prioritizing areas based on proximity of habitat under current and changed future climates.…”

“…Highest ranked cells include the highest densities (local occurrence levels) of the species with highest weights. The mathematical details and principles of core-area ZONATION are described in Moilanen et al (2005) and Moilanen (2007), and in the ZONATION user manual (Moilanen & Kujala, 2008); illustrative regionalscale examples of the use of core-area ZONATION include Leathwick et al (2008) and Kremen et al (2008).…”

“…We identified priority areas using the ZONATION method and software (Moilanen et al, 2005). ZONATION produces a hierarchical ranking of conservation priority over the entire landscape, accounting for factors such as locally varying habitat quality for each species and land cost.…”

“…This increases the challenges to evaluating the effectiveness of such reserves under climate change as species' habitat migrates to nonreserved areas (Araú jo et al, 2004). Recent efforts have combined new robust habitat modeling methods for presence-only data (MAXENT; Phillips et al, 2006;Phillips & Dudik, 2008) with reserve selection software adapted to process the large numbers of resultant habitat suitability surfaces (ZONATION; Moilanen et al, 2005;Moilanen & Kujala, 2008) to identify reserve systems that optimize habitat quality and connectivity for many species across large regions Correspondence: Carlos Carroll, e-mail: carlos@klamathconservat ion.org Global Change Biology (2010Biology ( ) 16, 891-904, doi: 10.1111Biology ( /j.1365Biology ( -2486Biology ( .2009 r 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd (Kremen et al, 2008;Leathwick et al, 2008;Thomson et al, 2009). Here we extend this approach to design reserve networks that are resilient to climate change and balance goals for wide-ranging focal species and a broad suite of localized endemics.…”

Metapopulation Capacity Meets Evolutionary Distinctness: Spatial Fragmentation Complements Phylogenetic Rarity in Prioritization

“…However, something that could be accounted for is complementarity, as in the case where two islands contain the same sets of species. Many sophisticated spatial planning tools try to take this into account, one such being Zonation (Moilanen et al 2005 ;Moilanen 2007 ).…”