Optimum Selection of conservation reserves: Extensions to multiple Land use

Military installations are required to protect remnants of suitable habitat areas for rare, threatened, or endangered species in the U.S. while simultaneously addressing land demands to support growing needs for new and conventional training requirements. This leads to an increased pressure to manage federal lands in optimal ways that balance competing objectives and land uses. Mathematical programming methods, in particular linear integer programming, have been used widely in the biological conservation and reserve design literature. Most of the recent works have focused on one specific land use, namely species conservation. In many cases, however, it is important to simultaneously consider multiple land uses within a landscape. We introduce a multiple land use allocation model that includes spatial and ecological criteria and highlight two extensions: a multiple land use meta-clustering model and a multiple land use proximity-to-roads model. A large-scale real data set for the area surrounding Fort Benning (Georgia) is used to optimally select conservation management areas and military training areas. We believe this approach will contribute to the ability of land managers at installations to extract more overall utility from military installation training and testing areas.