The Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge (EHNWR) and Conservation Area, when completed, will serve to protect the upland habitats and wetlands of the Everglades watersheds. Completing the "reserve design” for this protected area involves many ecological, social, and political factors to successfully identify parcels of land for protection. Land acquisition choices are difficult because it typically takes many years to gather the funds to purchase all necessary parcels of land, and initial land acquisition planning could be complicated by future conditions such as projected climate and urbanization changes across the landscape. To meet the reserve design needs of the EHNWR, we used the conservation planning software Marxan to allocate the targets among two “zones” representing different methods of protection: fee-simple purchase and conservation easement agreements. Projections from urban growth models revealed how climate change could affect the study area by examining how urbanization associated with people moving inland from the coast might affect the availability of parcels for inclusion in the reserve.
Results/Conclusions
Our Marxan scenarios allow us to compare the resulting reserve designs with those obtained without urbanization to examine: 1) reserve costs, 2) number of real estate transactions, and 3) ability to meet targets. We found that the cost of reserves increased substantially under urbanization, and some habitat targets could not be met in those scenarios. To add further realism to finding a reserve design solution, we developed a dynamic-heuristic model that simulates reserve site selection on an annual basis, and considers uncertainty associated with annual budgets and the probability that a parcel is lost to development from year to year. Initial tests show that this new heuristic could have wide applicability in large-scale reserve design.