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There is a great concern about the loss of biodiversity that calls for more nature protection. Unfortunately, the funding available for conservation is limited, and often a compromise is needed between nature protection and economic interests. Reserve selection algorithms are optimization techniques that concentrate on identifying a set of reserves that represents biodiversity efficiently. Simple approaches to reserve selection use presence–absence data assuming that if a species occurs in a selected reserve, it will persist there indefinitely.

A refinement of this technique is the selection of reserves according to the local probabilities of occurrence of the given species. These can be estimated from habitat models fitted by empirical modelling techniques. However, local probabilities of occurrence are not static, and are influenced by the changing threats to biodiversity in and around the reserves.

The effects of …