Abstract Creative and strategic approaches are needed to achieve conservation goals in contemporary landscapes. Protected area expansion competes with multiple demands for land and needs to accommodate the socio-economic realities of landscapes to be effective. Smaller planning units can improve targeted acquisitions for protected areas, but ‘subdivision’ used in conservation planning has typically followed ecological patterns. Instead, we suggest that subdividing based on anthropogenic land-development patterns could improve strategic achievement of conservation goals by producing smaller planning units that are also socio-economically relevant. We simulated this approach to subdivision in a New England, USA landscape and evaluated the outcomes for three conservation planning scenarios – protect riparian corridors, protect rare habitats, and protect representative habitats – in the original and subdivided property delineations. For each scenario-delineation combination, we identified protected land expansion solutions that optimized a priority objective within a budget or achieved a conservation target at minimum cost. We used a multi-objective optimization algorithm to identify solutions to navigate tradeoffs between ecological, social, and economic objectives. In our study area, subdivision allowed us to optimize ecological outcomes within a budget and achieve conservation targets at reduced cost. While subdivision solutions were not able to simultaneously improve outcomes for all objectives, they were often able to reduce individual and aggregate outcomes compared to solutions in the originally delineated landscape. Subdivision could be a useful tool for improving implementation of conservation goals because it results in smaller planning units that are able to spatially represent conservation objectives more exactly while remaining socio-economically relevant.

中文翻译：

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为保护而细分？

摘要 需要创造性和战略性的方法来实现当代景观的保护目标。保护区扩张与对土地的多种需求相竞争，需要适应景观的社会经济现实才能有效。较小的规划单位可以改善保护区的有针对性的收购，但保护规划中使用的“细分”通常遵循生态模式。相反，我们建议基于人为土地开发模式的细分可以通过产生与社会经济相关的较小规划单元来提高保护目标的战略成就。我们在美国新英格兰的景观中模拟了这种细分方法，并评估了三种保护规划方案的结果——保护河岸走廊、保护稀有栖息地、并保护具有代表性的栖息地——在原始和细分的财产范围内。对于每个场景-描绘组合，我们确定了保护土地扩展解决方案，以在预算内优化优先目标或以最低成本实现保护目标。我们使用多目标优化算法来确定解决方案，以在生态、社会和经济目标之间进行权衡。在我们的研究区域，细分使我们能够在预算内优化生态结果，并以更低的成本实现保护目标。虽然细分解决方案无法同时改善所有目标的结果，但与最初描绘的景观中的解决方案相比，它们通常能够减少个体和总体结果。