Integrating Land Market Feedbacks into Conservation Planning—A Mathematical Programming Approach

Nature reserves are often designated ad hoc. Despite increasing conservation efforts, loss of biodiversity is still accelerating. Considering land scarcity and demand for alternative uses, efficiency in conservation strongly correlates with efficiency in land allocation. Systematic conservation planning can effectively prioritize conservation activities. Previous studies minimize opportunity costs for given conservation targets. However, these studies assume constant marginal costs of habitat protection. We extend this cost minimization approach by also considering a dynamic representation of marginal costs. The more land is allocated to nature reserves, the higher are opportunity costs, i.e., costs of forgone agricultural production. This increase in costs results from changes in the prices of agricultural commodities. We employ a deterministic, spatially explicit mathematical optimization model to allocate species habitats by minimizing opportunity costs for setting aside land for conservation purposes. The model is designed as a mixed integer programming problem and solved with GAMS/CPLEX. Our results show the need for integrating land market feedbacks into conservation planning. We find that ignoring land rent adjustments can lead to highly cost-ineffective solutions in reserve selection.     

Dynamics and origin of PM2.5 during a three-year sampling period in Beijing, China

Systematic sampling and analysis were performed to investigate the dynamics and the origin of suspended particulate matter smaller than 2.5 μm in diameter (PM(2.5)), in Beijing, China from 2005 to 2008. Identifying the source of PM(2.5) was the main goal of this project, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The concentrations of 19 elements, black carbon (BC) and the total mass in 158 weekly PM(2.5) samples were measured. The statistical evaluation of the data from factor analysis (FA) identifies four main sources responsible for PM(2.5) in Beijing: (1) a combination of long-range transport geogenic soil particles, geogenic-like particles from construction sites and the anthropogenic emissions from steel factories; (2) road traffic, industry emissions and domestic heating; (3) local re-suspended soil particles; (4) re-suspended particles from refuse disposal/landfills and uncontrolled dumped waste. Special attention has been paid to seven high concentration "episodes", which were further analyzed by FA, enrichment factor analysis (EF), elemental signatures and backward-trajectory analysis. These results suggest that long-range transport soil particles contribute much to the high concentration of PM(2.5) during dust days. This is supported by mineral analysis which showed a clear imprint of component in PM(2.5). Furthermore, the ratios of Mg/Al have been proved to be a good signature to trace back different source areas. The Pb/Ti ratio allows the distinction between periods of predominant anthropogenic and geogenic sources during high concentration episodes. Backward-trajectory analysis clearly shows the origins of these episodes, which partly corroborate the FA and EF results. This study is only a small contribution to the understanding of the meteorological and source driven dynamics of PM(2.5) concentrations.