Using Political-Ecological Models to Sustain Biodiversity

Because of the irreversibility of a species' global extinction,
the chances of future extinction events need to driven to zero across
a wide range species, both flora and fauna.  A necessary step towards reducing
these chances is to find and implement politically feasible
ecosystem management plans that can head off extinction events.
This article's first contribution is a first of its kind software toolkit
that implements one way to find these plans.  This
toolkit provides an organization the means to (1) build a
political-ecological model; (2) fit this model to a political-ecological
data set; and finally, (3) use this model to compute the
 most practical ecosystem management plan (MPEMP).
This model-based approach to first understanding the political issues
surrounding the conservation of a selected endangered species and then second,
finding a conservation plan that works with these political realities -- is
hamstrung by the challenging and expensive computations needed
to first, fit a political-ecological model to data and then second, compute
the MPEMP from this fitted model.  Therefore, this article's second
contribution is a new optimization algorithm that overcomes this
challenge when it is run on a cluster computer.

 This new algorithm finds the global solution to an

optimization problem characterized by constraints and a black-box,
stochastic objective function that may have multiple extrema and
jump discontinuities. 
This toolkit is illustrated by finding the MPEMP for conserving the
cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) population across Kenya and Tanzania.