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Habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to biodiversity. Establishing formal protected areas is one means of conserving habitat, but socio‐economic and political constraints limit the amount of land in such status. Addressing conservation issues on lands outside of formal protected areas is also necessary. In this paper we develop a spatially explicit model for analyzing the consequences of alternative land‐use patterns on the persistence of various species and on market‐oriented economic returns. The biological model uses habitat preferences, habitat area requirements, and dispersal ability for each species to predict the probability of persistence of that species given a land‐use pattern. The economic model uses characteristics of the land unit and location to predict the value of commodity production given a land‐use pattern. We use the combined biological and economic model to search for efficient land …