Triage for Habitats: A decision Theoretic Approach
When threatened habitats cannot all be conserved, immediately delay costs are unavoidable. Such costs take the form of species extinctions and higher species recovery costs. The habitat triage problem is to minimize such delay costs by determining an optimal order in which to conserve habitat tracts. Here, we compared several simple triage rules and a dynamic reserve selection model for scheduling habitat conservation. We considered several forms of delay cost rarely considered by conservation planners. These included declines in the number of species co-occurring within land parcels and increases in the cost of land parcels when they become accessible for development. We show that the optimal order in which to conserve habitat tracts depends strongly on which delay costs are considered. Another finding was that simple scheduling rules are unlikely to be effective in habitat triage. Our analyses provide a quantitative basis for applying triage principles to habitat conservation.