| Summary: | Establishing the conservation reserves is an efficient approach to protect various species, in which maintaining the spatial characteristics of the habit is an important issue. A continuous and compact reserve is vital for long-term survival and reproduction of various species. However, the existing methods for nature reserve design have the problem of the selected sites which are sparse in space. The sparseness refers to the isolated regions which are the unselected (selected) sites and surrounded by the selected (unselected) sites in the designed nature reserve and thus making the management of protected areas and exchange of information between species difficult. In this paper, we propose the concept of a dual-flow mechanism which is called the dual-flow structure (DFS) to address the problem of sparseness in sites selected for the reserve network design. The DFS constructs two consecutive arcs: one is for selected sites and the other is for unselected sites, simultaneously. Those two arcs ensure that each site has at least one adjacent site which has the same status (selected/unselected) with the competitive mechanism. The concept of two consecutive arcs can solve the problem of sparseness and achieve spatial continuity. The DFS further utilizes the perimeter in dual-flow structure to achieve the spatial characteristic of compactness. The main contributions of this study are: (1) we design a novel mathematical model which solves the problem of sparseness in the space, including selected and un-selected sites; and (2) the DFS generates the connectivity and compactness of the reserve network with the scientific and reasonable techniques. In the experiments, we take the Daiyun Mountains as a study area to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model.
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