Biodiversity Conservation and Phylogenetic Systematics

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Reserve Selection Problems

ForreserveselectionwedefinetheSDofasubsetofareasastheSDoftheunion
setoftaxapresentintheseareas.Thereserveselectionisformalizedas:

To illustrate the problem consider the geographical distribution of the ten pheas-
ants (Table 1 ). The data were obtained from the global biodiversity information
facility (www.gbif.org; accessed on December 1st, 2013), where a country is listed
as habitat only if there are at least three observations for the species. Table 1 shows
that these pheasants occur in eight countries in South Asia. G. gallus and P. bical-
caratum occur in seven and two countries, respectively, whereas the remaining
speciesareendemictoonecountry.IndonesiaandMalaysiaeachhostthreespecies,
SriLankaonlyonespecies,andtheremainingfivecountriesarehometotwo
species each.
Ifonewantstoselectfourcountrieswithmaximaldiversity,thenthedecision
heavilydependsonthetreesornetwork(Figs. 1 and 2b). Table 2 shows that using

Problem 4 (Reserve Selection)

Given a split set for ntaxadistributedinm areas, find a subset of k areas that

maximizesSDoverallsubsetsofk areas.

P.malacense

P.emphanum

P.bicalcaratum

P.inopinatum

P.chalcurum P.germaini

G.sonneratii

G.gallus

G.lafayetii

G.varius

Fig. 4 Artificialexampleofdependencynetworkforthepheasantdataset

O. Chernomor et al.