Heuristic and optimal solutions for set‐covering problems in conservation biology

Area‐selection methods have recently gained prominence in conservation biology. A typical problem is to identify the minimum number of areas required to represent all species over some geographic region. Iterative heuristic methods have been developed by conservation scientists to solve these problems, although the solutions cannot be guaranteed to be optimal. Although optimal solutions can often be found, heuristics continue to be popular as they are perceived to be faster and more transparent as they are intuitively easy to understand. We used distributional data for 1921 bird species, 939 mammal species, 405 snake species, and 617 amphibian species compiled at the Zoological Museum, Univ. of Copenhagen for all 1° cells of mainland sub‐Saharan Africa to compare the quality of the…