This repository hosts the codebase for a research project focused on understanding how conservation planning can be adapted to prioritize the conservation of full ecological networks and their diverse array of species' biotic interactions instead of species richness alone. This project provides a simulation framework in which populations of many virtual species are distributed in a sotchastic manner across a virtual landscape discretized in hexagonal tiles. Then, a conservation plan is applied to the landscape by following diverse local prioritization criteria, like favouring protection of tiles with high species richness, or tiles that increase connectivity of protected areas, and the global output at the ecological network scale is quantified.
The project will explore two main avenues: (1) understand how different spatial configurations of protected areas (single large or several small) contribute to conervation at the landscape scale and (2) understand which set of local criteria is more favourable to maximize the diversity of biotic interactions and how different these are from the criteria that maximizes the diversity of species.
This project is being developped with support of the Beca Leonardo de Investigación Científica y Creación Cultural 2024 de la Fundación BBVA.