UC Santa Barbara

Numerous models have been put forth to help with the growing demand for the establishment of biodiversity reserves. One site selection model that has been used in several recent studies is SITES [S.J. Andelman, I. Ball, F.W. Davis and D.M. Stoms, SITES V 1.0: an analytical toolbox for designing ecoregional conservation portfolios, Unpublished manual prepared for the nature conservancy, 1999, 1-43. (available at http://www.biogeog.ucsb.edu /projects/tnc/toolbox.html)]. SITES includes two heuristic solvers: based on Greedy and Simulated Annealing. We discuss the formulation of the SITES model, present a new formulation for that problem, and solve a number of test problems optimally using off-the-shelf software. We compared our optimal results with the SITES Simulated Annealing heuristic and found that SITES frequently returns significantly suboptimal solutions. Our results add further support to the argument, started by Underhill [L.G. Underhill, Optimal and suboptimal reserve selection algorithms, Biol. Conserv. 70 (1994) 85-87], continuing through Rodrigues and Gaston [A.S.L. Rodrigues and K.J. Gaston, Optimization in reserve selection procedures - why not?, Biol. Conserv. 107 (2002) 123-129], for greater integration of optimal methods in the reserve design/selection literature.