Selecting a Land Conservation Reserve for Local or Regional Ecosystem Health with Development: Amphibian Metapopulation and Residential Development

Establishing habitat corridors has been an important strategy in many conservation practices. Nonetheless, the existing literature has ignored the role habitat corridors could play in reserve network design. Based on modern ecological theory, the effectiveness of a reserve system largely depends on its connectivity, but it is less clear how recent spatial modeling of reserve network design improves the connectivity of the reserve system as required by population persistence in a highly fragmented, heterogeneous landscape. This study explicitly incorporates the idea of habitat corridor into optimal reserve design, an approach which might significantly reduce the uncertainty brought by land use change or a source-sink habitat matrix. More importantly, by formulating this conservation issue into an integer programming problem, this study demonstrates a general, systematic, and flexible way to design a well-connected reserve network, and develops standard modeling methods readily applicable to many conservation practices.