Locating and protecting critical reserve sites to minimize expected and worst-case losses

There has been much recent interest in the development of systematic reserve selection

methods that are capable of incorporating uncertainty associated with site destruction.

This paper makes a contribution to this line of research by presenting two different optimization

models for minimizing species losses within a planning region. Given limited acquisition

budgets, the first minimizes expected species losses over all possible site loss

patterns outside the reserve network while the second minimizes maximum species losses

following the worst-case loss of a restricted subset of nonreserve sites. By incorporating the

uncertainty of site destruction directly into the decision planning process, these models

allow a conservation planner to take a less defensive and more strategic view of reserve

selection that seeks to minimize species losses through the targeted acquisition of highvalue/

high-risk sites. We compare both of these methods to a more standard approach,

which simply maximizes within reserve representation without regard for the varied level

of threat faced by different sites and species. Results on a realistic dataset show that significant

reductions in species losses can be achieved using either of these more intelligent

modeling frameworks.