Conservation planning to zone protected areas under optimal landscape management for bird conservation

This study proposes a two-stage conservation planning approach. Firstly, the Land-Use Pattern Optimization-library is used to maximize the suitability of habitats for target species by optimizing configuration based on the current landscape. Secondly, the systematic conservation planning tool, Marxan is used to identify protected areas based on the estimated species distributions from the optimal landscape configuration. We compared our conservation plan for three target bird species from a highland farm with the conservation plan produced using Marxan alone. Our comparison showed the effectiveness of our approach by selecting a reserve network with higher habitat suitability, better connection, and smaller size after relatively minor landscape modification. The proposed approach advances previous reserve site selection algorithms by considering optimal landscape configuration and potential species distributions for a reserve network design. Our approach yields priority maps to guide the design of a reserve network as well as identify landscape management for conservation.