Road network and conservation conflicts in cerrado: a study for amphibian preservation- DOI: 10.4025/actascibiolsci.171

Abstract

Building conservation units has been an important tool to minimize the loss of biodiversity. However, the allocation of these units need to be optimized to preserve the greatest number of species, under a series of socioeconomics restrictions that include the road network effect on biodiversity. An optimization process was made by using the “simulated annealing” algorithm, available on program SITES 1.0, to model a set of data on the distribution of 131 species of anuran amphibians occuring in Cerrado, distributed in 181 cells with 1º of spatial resolution. This study shows a couple of conservation units networks in Brazilian Cerrado, one of them based on the concept of complementarity and another on the distribution of roads. This paper points out the most important sites to create conservation units, attempting to preserve anuran amphibians from Cerrado and the places that should protect all anuran species spread on this biome, along the roads’ length. The results suggest that both networks should be used to combine conservation plans and human development, evaluated by means of road network.