Coral reefs are highly vulnerable habitats, threatened by climate change and local anthropogenic impacts. Management is imperative, spatial prioritisation apportions the area of interest to inform investments scarce conservation resources. Spatially delineated planning units used make management decisions typically large enough contain significant natural variabilities, but ecological significa...

Ecuador has the largest number of species by area worldwide, but also a low representation of species within its protected areas. Here, we applied systematic conservation planning to identify potential areas for conservation in continental Ecuador, with the aim of increasing the representation of terrestrial species diversity in the protected area network. We selected 809 terrestrial species (a...

The recently launched Brazilian "forest certificates" market is expected to reduce environmental compliance costs for landowners through an offset mechanism, after a long history of conservation laws based in command-and-control and strict rules. In this paper we assessed potential costs and evaluated the cost-effectiveness of the instrument when introducing to this market constraints that aim ...

Abandonment of agricultural land has resulted in forest regeneration in species-rich dry grasslands across European mountain regions and threatens conservation efforts in this vegetation type. To support national conservation strategies, we used a site-selection algorithm (MARXAN) to find optimum sets of floristic regions (reporting units) that contain grasslands of high conservation priority. ...

We describe two approaches for spatial optimization of protected area placement, both based on maximizing an objective function that incorporates ecological, social, and economical criteria. Of these, a seed cell selection procedure works by evaluating potential cells for protection one by one, picking the one that maximizes the objective function, adding seed cells. This continues to full prot...

Reserves are at the heart of global policies to stop erosion biodiversity. Optimisation is increasingly used identify reserve locations that preserve biodiversity a minimum cost human activities. Two classes algorithms solve this site selection problem: metaheuristic (such as simulated annealing, commonly implemented in Marxan) and exact optimisation (i.e. integer programming, PrioritizR). Alth...

Colombia is the country with highest number of orchid species (4270), whose optimal habitat cold and humid forests. However, outlook for conservation alarming, considering that deforestation causing loss millions hectares This situation has led to existence 206 endangered species. Therefore, this research was conducted determine Sites Special Importance Conservation Threatened Orchid Species in...