Can accounting for unequal ecological links improve reserve design?

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Real patterns of ecological connectivity are seldom explicitly or systematically included in systematic conservation planning, partly because commonly used decision support systems capture only simplistic notions of connectivity. Conventionally, the surrogates used to represent connectivity in conservation plans have assumed that the connection between two sites is equally strong in both directions. In reality, ecological links between sites are rarely symmetric and are often strongly asymmetric.

The researchers developed a new formulation that allowed them to incorporate asymmetric connectivity into Marxan, a conservation decision support system. They illustrated the approach with hypothetical examples of a river catchment and a group of reefs, then applied it to case studies in Australia's Snowy River catchment and Great Barrier Reef. In systematic reserve design, incorporating asymmetric ecological connectivity produced solutions that captured connectivity patterns more effectively than either ignoring connectivity or assuming symmetric connectivity.