East Maui, Hawaiʻi optimization of climate resilient habitat for native plant species recovery, 2021

Multi-species recovery planning can be a challenging natural resource management task. In collaboration with state and federal agencies, and botanical and technical experts, we developed and tested a multi-step optimization process to assist in identifying the minimum climate resilient habitat for the recovery of multiple threatened, endangered, and at-risk plant species across east Maui. Data include the underlying land-use configuration file, predictive climate models, list of plant species and number of populations to recover/protect, habitat and forest bird distribution information, presence of fencing, land management status, and naming protocol file. We identified a suite of potential conservation footprints that are constrained by ecological and resource management selection criteria based input and co-production with botanical experts and resource managers. These solutions include recovery habitat for all species of interest. The optimization process also identified priority recovery planning units, equal to the number of populations required for recovery, to inform find-scale recovery efforts. Data include: 1) underlying land-use configuration and input metrics used for optimization, input_metrics.gpkg; 2) species list, species_list.csv; 3) and output metrics from an example solution, pu_solution_example.gpkg.