C ommunications Ecological Applications, 21(5), 2011, pp. 1419–1426 Ó 2011 by the Ecological Society of America Balancing alternative land uses in conservation prioritization ATTE MOILANEN, 1,9 BARBARA J. ANDERSON, 2 FELIX EIGENBROD, 3,4 ANDREAS HEINEMEYER, 5 DAVID B. ROY, 6 SIMON GILLINGS, 7 PAUL R. ARMSWORTH, 3,8 KEVIN J. GASTON, 3 AND CHRIS D. THOMAS 2 1 Finnish Centre of Excellence in Metapopulation Biology, Department of Biosciences, P.O. Box 65, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland 2 Department of Biology, P.O. Box 373, University of York, York YO10 5YW United Kingdom 3 Biodiversity and Macroecology Group, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN United Kingdom 4 School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Life Sciences Building (B85), Highfield Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ United Kingdom 5 Centre of Terrestrial Carbon Dynamics (York Centre), Stockholm Environment Institute at York and Environment Department, University of York, York YO10 5DD United Kingdom 6 NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 8BB United Kingdom 7 British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk IP24 2PU United Kingdom 8 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-1601 USA Abstract. Pressure on ecosystems to provide various different and often conflicting services is immense and likely to increase. The impacts and success of conservation prioritization will be enhanced if the needs of competing land uses are recognized at the planning stage. We develop such methods and illustrate them with data about competing land uses in Great Britain, with the aim of developing a conservation priority ranking that balances between needs of biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, agricultural value, and urban development potential. While both carbon stocks and biodiversity are desirable features from the point of view of conservation, they compete with the needs of agriculture and urban development. In Britain the greatest conflicts exist between biodiversity and urban areas, while the largest carbon stocks occur mostly in Scotland in areas with low agricultural or urban pressure. In our application, we were able successfully to balance the spatial allocation of alternative land uses so that conflicts between them were much smaller than had they been developed separately. The proposed methods and software, Zonation, are applicable to structurally similar prioritization problems globally. Key words: ecosystem service; land use planning; multiobjective optimization; opportunity cost; reserve selection; site selection; software; Zonation. INTRODUCTION A practical challenge that conservation scientists face is to develop ecologically meaningful methods that can be applied to conservation decision making at a national or continental scale, and at a sufficiently fine spatial resolution that the results are relevant to operational land use planning. In reality, analyses are complicated by uncertain data, large regions over which priorities may need to be set, ecological issues such as connectivity effects or landscape dynamics, and the need to consider costs and alternative land uses (Sarkar et al. 2006, Pressey et al. 2007). A number of approaches and software packages have been developed for conservation prioritization and conservation resource allocation, including MARXAN (Watts et al. 2009), C-Plan (Pressey et al. 2009), and ConsNet (Sarkar et al. 2006). Our approach here, Zonation (Moilanen et al. 2005, 2009), differs from these other approaches in that it primarily produces a priority ranking rather than a ‘‘satisfy targets with minimum cost’’ type of a solution. Zonation also is applicable to very large data sets (landscapes of up to tens of millions of grid cells with data), being able to evaluate species-specific connectivity considerations at large extents using fine-resolution data, making it suitable to develop conservation priorities that are ecologically relevant and also appro- priate to the scale of land management decisions. We here expand Zonation to allow balancing of alternative land uses that are positive or negative from the perspective of conservation. This capability combined with the relatively complicated ecologically based model of conservation value allowed by Zonation makes it Manuscript received 24 September 2010; accepted 19 January 2011. Corresponding Editor: E. A. Newell. 9 E-mail: atte.moilanen@helsinki.fi 1419