to preserve wildlife habitats and populations, it is normal practice to select representative natural areas. the aim of this research is prioritization of candidate sites for environmental protection in mazandaran province. for this purpose, 26 forest cover types, habitats of 8 mammal species and important distribution areas for 4 groups of birds were used as input criteria. simulated annealing...

One of the key purposes conservation selection strategies is to design a network sites support relevant biodiversity components and, therefore, decrease risk populations becoming isolated. To this end, it important be aware habitat locations target species and threats human activities, in order identify areas high priority. This paper takes Chaharmahal Bakhtiari province (Iran) as case study, h...

Ecuador will experience a significant expansion of the oil industry in its Amazonian region, one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. In view of the changes that are about to come, we explore the conflicts between oil extraction interests and biodiversity protection and apply systematic conservation planning to identify priority areas that should be protected in different oil exploitation...

The adequate selection of indicator groups of biodiversity is an important aspect of the systematic conservation planning. However, these assessments differ in the spatial scales, in the methods used and in the groups considered to accomplish this task, which generally produces contradictory results. The quantification of the spatial congruence between species richness and complementarity among...

Climate change is redistributing terrestrial and marine biodiversity altering fundamental ecological interactions. To conserve promote its long-term persistence, protected areas should account for the implications of species’ redistribution. Data paucity across many systems means that achieving this goal requires generic metrics act as proxies likely responses multiple taxa to climate change. v...

There is growing support for characterizing ecosystem services in order to link conservation and human well-being. However, few studies have explicitly included ecosystem services within systematic conservation planning, and those that have follow two fundamentally different approaches: ecosystem services as intrinsically-important targeted benefits vs. substitutable co-benefits. We present a f...

Inclusion of spatially explicit information on ecosystem services in conservation planning is a fairly new practice. This study analyses how the incorporation of ecosystem services as conservation features can affect conservation of forest biodiversity and how different opportunity cost constraints can change spatial priorities for conservation. We created spatially explicit cost-effective cons...

In conservation prioritisation, it is often implicit that representation targets for individual habitat types act as surrogates for the species that inhabit them. Yet for many commercially and ecologically important coral reef fish species, connectivity among different habitats in a seascape may be more important than any single habitat alone. Approaches to conservation prioritisation that cons...

By addressing several key features overlooked in previous studies, i.e. human disturbance, integration of ecosystem- and species-level conservation features, and principles of complementarity and representativeness, we present the first national-scale systematic conservation planning for China to determine the optimized spatial priorities for biodiversity conservation. We compiled a spatial dat...