Biodiversity Conservation Informatics Group

Spatial Conservation Prioritization

Senior researcher: Atte Moilanen
Researcher : Mar Cabeza
Post graduate students: Anni Arponen, Heini Kujala and Joona Lehtomäki

1. Evaluation of conservation outcome: habitat suitability, connectivity and persistence
2. Evaluation of conservation outcome: weighting and valuing biodiversity, surrogacy
3. Large-scale spatial optimization and conservation prioritization
4. The Zonation framework and software
5. Community-level approaches to conservation planning
6. Uncertainty analysis methods for conservation planning
7. Conservation planning and climate change
8. Sequential conservation prioritization (scheduling of conservation action)
9. Application example: reserve planning for Madagascar.
10. Application example: planning at New Zealand
11. Applications within Finland
12. An edited volume about Spatial Conservation Prioritization

Spatial Conservation Prioritization concerns well-informed and efficient allocation of the resources available for conservation. Due to limited resources, habitat loss and climate change, it is important to allocate conservation effort in an efficient manner. The aim of this project is to develop theory, methods, and computational tools that allow ecologically based and cost-effective selection of reserve networks to ensure long-term persistence of biodiversity. These methods should be robust to uncertainty in the major underlying assumptions concerning factors determining species distributions. This work builds on the collective knowledge in the MRG about how fundamental population-dynamic processes determine species distributions, on the experience of Moilanen in optimization and software development, and on the experience of Cabeza in conservation science.

Spatial conservation prioritization is often associated with so-called site selection algorithms, which are computational methods that search for the most efficient possible set of conservation areas. In a more general sense, conservation prioritization is not only about the selection of reserve sites, but effort could also be allocated to maintenance or restoration of habitats. Despite having a consensus within the scientific community that site selection algorithms are needed as decision support tools, these methods have been criticized as being insufficient for real conservation use: The methods have been criticized e.g. for the following reasons: some algorithms are applicable to too small landscapes, logistic constraints are ignored, all species are treated equally regardless of their conservation value, uncertainty analysis as well as key ecological and anthropogenic processes are ignored, and many methods are applicable only to linear problems. The reserve selection project in the MRG addresses broadly these issues. We aim at producing methods that are realistic enough to be practically useful and we develop publicly available software for this purpose. One example of such publicly available software is Zonation. We develop our methods in the context of several empirical studies, including collaborations for example in UK, Madagascar, New Zealand, Australia and Finland.