ABSTRACT:Many biophysical models exhibit epistasis (interdependence), where a conservation action impacts the effectiveness of another elsewhere. At the same time, ranking conservation actions according to the independent benefit-to-cost ratios is cost-efficient when epistasis is absent. We use benefit-to-cost rankings as starting points for an evolutionary algorithm employing an epistatic biophysical model. We model a variety of conservation actions to assess trade-offs for sediment reduction and wildlife conservation in the study watershed. We find that despite the presence of epistasis, the weighted benefit-to-cost ratio-derived solutions perform remarkably well in the decision space, but effects in objective space need the model evaluation. (JEL Q25, Q52)

中文翻译：

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好种子结好果：在上位性下的多目标空间优化中使用效益成本比

摘要：许多生物物理模型表现出上位性（相互依赖），其中保护行动会影响其他地方的另一项行动的有效性。同时，当上位性不存在时，根据独立的收益成本比对保护行动进行排序是具有成本效益的。我们使用收益成本排名作为采用上位生物物理模型的进化算法的起点。我们模拟了各种保护行动，以评估研究流域中沉积物减少和野生动物保护的权衡。我们发现，尽管存在上位性，加权收益成本比派生的解决方案在决策空间中表现得非常好，但在目标空间中的效果需要模型评估。(JEL Q25, Q52)