Planning habitat restoration with genetic algorithms

Conservation is an ethic of sustainable use of natural resources which focuses on the preservation of biodiversity. The term conservation planning encompasses the set of activities, typically carried out by conservation managers, that contribute to the attainment of this goal. Such activities can be preventive, such as the establishment of conservation reserves, or remedial, such as the displacement (or offsetting) of the species to be protected or the culling of invasive species. This last technique is often referred to as habitat restoration and, because of its lower impact on economic activities, is becoming more and more popular among conservation managers. In this paper we present the original formulation of the habitat restoration planning (HRP) problem, which captures some of the decisions and constraints faced by conservation managers in the context of habitat restoration. Example scenarios are drawn from the insular Great Barrier Reef (QLD) and Pilbara (WA) regions of Australia. In addition to the problem formulation, we describe an optimisation solver for the HRP, based on genetic algorithms (GAs), we discuss the preliminary results obtained by our solver, and we outline the current and future directions for the project.