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Multiple Criterion Synchronisation for Conservation Area Network Design: The Use of Non-dominated Alternative Sets
Sahotra Sarkar and Justin Garson

This article shows how a standard technique from multiple-criteria decision making, the computation of non-dominated alternative sets, can be adapted to incorporate non-biological criteria such as socio-political ones during the design of biodiversity conservation area networks. There are three chief advantages of this approach: (a) unlike almost all other methods for incorporating multiple criteria in decision making, this technique avoids making arbitrary utility assignments to alternatives; (b) it only requires comparative rankings of the alternatives under the criteria to be synchronised; and (c) it often results in several alternatives of equal status, leaving a further choice to be made by political decision-making bodies. This allows those bodies to bring into consideration criteria that cannot be satisfactorily formally modelled. The use of this method is demonstrated using a data set from Texas, one from Ecuador and two artificially constructed data sets.