Fuel treatment planning maintaining habitat availability and connectivity for endangered species conservation

Fuel treatment activities are primarily driven by the need to reduce fuel accumulation in fire-prone landscapes to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, with occasional fuel treatments designed to address ecological objectives. Reducing fuel in the landscape while maintaining habitat for fauna, fragmenting areas of high fuel loads while ensuring connectivity of habitat, presents land managers with seemingly contrasting objectives. Faced with this dichotomy, we propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model that can optimally schedule fuel treatments to reduce fuel hazards by fragmenting high fuel load regions while considering critical ecological requirements over time and space. The model takes into account both the frequency of fire that vegetation can tolerate and the frequency of fire necessary for fire-dependent species. Importantly, our approach also ensures that at the time an area is treated a suitable neighbouring habitat is available to allow fauna to relocate. Furthermore, the model sets a minimum acceptable target for contiguous habitat at any time to conserve fauna especially endangered species. These factors are all included in the formulation of a model that yields a multi-period spatially-explicit schedule for treatment planning. Our approach is then demonstrated in a series of computational experiments with a hypothetical landscape represented in grid cells with a single vegetation type and a single faunal species. Our experiments show that it is possible to reduce the risk of wildfires while ensuring sufficient contiguous areas of habitat over both space and time. This is critical for the conservation of fauna and of special concern for endangered species.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  arXiv: Optimization and Control

• Publication date

  2016-01-31

• Fields of study

  Biology, Mathematics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  arXiv 1602.00348
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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