ORIGINAL PAPER Optimized Floating Refugia: a new strategy for species conservation in production forest landscapes Benjamin S. Ramage • Justin Kitzes • Elaina C. Marshalek • Matthew D. Potts Received: 9 October 2012 / Accepted: 8 February 2013 / Published online: 20 February 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract Timber production forests can support diverse ecological communities, but existing conservation strategies fail to maximize this potential. While methods for limiting logging damage and locating biological reserves have been developed, strategies focused on the sequence and arrangement of harvest units are lacking, particularly for situations in which species-specific knowledge is limited. We present a new landscape-level approach to forest conservation that anticipates local extinctions and focuses on facilitating re-coloni- zation via strategic spatiotemporal harvest plans (which are informed by species occurrence data only). As a proof of concept, we applied our framework to data from four tropical forest sites and found clear benefits of optimized spatiotemporal harvest plans relative to non- optimized harvest plans (random and three pattern-based plans). Our proposed approach, termed the Optimized Floating Refugia strategy, requires minimal species-specific knowl- edge and can be used to enhance existing conservation efforts (e.g. biological reserve establishment, reduced-impact logging). The approach effectively prioritizes logging-sen- sitive habitat specialists with restricted ranges and thus provides the largest benefits to the most extinction-prone species. This simple but novel method shows promise as a general strategy to improve biodiversity conservation in species-rich production forest landscapes. Keywords Biodiversity Á Forest management Á Landscape-level planning Á Logging Á Spatiotemporal harvest planning Á Tropical forest Introduction Anthropogenic activities are responsible for elevated extinction rates worldwide (Barnosky et al. 2011), and many tropical regions are especially threatened (FAO 2010). The Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10531-013-0453-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. B. S. Ramage (&) Á J. Kitzes Á E. C. Marshalek Á M. D. Potts Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Mulford Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, USA e-mail: bsramage@berkeley.edu 123 Biodivers Conserv (2013) 22:789–801 DOI 10.1007/s10531-013-0453-0