A local optimization framework for addressing conservation conflicts in mosaic ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: An effective strategy to resolve conservation conflicts on lands outside of nature reserves is to consider the spatial arrangement of agricultural and native vegetation parcels such that the ecological value of the landscape is improved without reducing the amount of land used for agricultural production. Global optimization methods have been used to identify the best spatial arrangement of land parcels for a given project goal, but these methods are not designed to provide pathways to reach the optimum from the initial landscape. Here we describe how local search algorithms can be used to develop land parcel rearrangement pathways to obtain a landscape that sustains greater species richness than the initial landscape without changing the amount of land used for agricultural production. To

SUBMITTER: Nowack S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6544304 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature