Decision support tool for prioritizing sites for ecological surveys based on their potential to improve plans for conserving biodiversity (e.g. plans for establishing protected areas). Given a set of sites that could potentially be acquired for conservation management -- wherein some sites have previously been surveyed and other sites have not -- it can be used to generate and evaluate plans for additional surveys. Specifically, plans for ecological surveys can be generated using various conventional approaches (e.g. maximizing expected species richness, geographic coverage, diversity of sampled environmental conditions) and by maximizing value of information. After generating plans for surveys, they can also be evaluated using value of information analysis. For further details, see Hanson et al. (2023).
Details
The package vignette provides a tutorial
(accessible using the code vignettes("surveyvoi")
). Also, please note that
several functions depend on
the 'Gurobi' optimization software (available from https://www.gurobi.com)
and the gurobi R package (installation instructions
available online for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS).
Additionally, the JAGS software
(available from https://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.io/) is required to fit
hierarchical generalized linear models.
Citation
Please cite the surveyvoi package when using it in publications. To cite the package, please use:
Hanson, JO, McCune JL, Chadès I, Proctor CA, Hudgins EJ, & Bennett JR (2023) Optimizing ecological surveys for conservation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 60: 41--51.
References
Hanson, JO, McCune JL, Chadès I, Proctor CA, Hudgins EJ, & Bennett JR (2023) Optimizing ecological surveys for conservation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 60: 41--51.
See also
Useful links:
Package website (https://prioritizr.github.io/surveyvoi/)
Source code repository (https://github.com/prioritizr/surveyvoi)
Report bugs (https://github.com/prioritizr/surveyvoi/issues)
Author
Package authors:
Jeffrey O. Hanson jeffrey.hanson@uqconnect.edu.au ORCID
Iadine Chadès iadine.chades@csiro.au ORCID
Emma J. Hudgins emma.hudgins@mail.mcgill.ca ORCID
Joseph R. Bennett joseph.bennett@carleton.ca ORCID