SecSel, a new software tool for conservation prioritization that is applicable to ordinal-scale data for multiple biodiversity features

Transverse Mercator (zone 54) coordinate reference system. We used the “add geometry attri- butes” tool of ArcGIS 10.3 to calculate the area. The grid cells were approximately 1 × 1 km (30-second latitude difference and 45-second longitude difference). The study area consists of the grid cells within and around the special protection area of the national park. To define the study area, we used the Nature Park Area polygon data available from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism [14]. The total area of the study site was 892.7 km2. We then categorized the habitat quality of each grid cell for each vegetation type into four rank classes based on the area of the vegetation type within the cell (Fig 3). Evaluation of ecosystem services. We measured the value of ecosystem services from the viewpoint of tourism resources. We considered the sum of the areas of snow-meadow and fell- field vegetation as the quality of tourism resources, because these types of vegetation form attractive flower fields, which are highly valuable resources for tourism. We categorized the resource quality of each grid cell into four rank classes based on the sum of the areas of the veg- etation types within the cell (Fig 3). These vegetation types were also included in the targets of biodiversity conservation, but we considered conservation and tourism to be competitive uses, and we selected sites for tourism and sites for conservation separately. Conflicts among features. Tourism can be a threat to the conservation of vegetation

because of trampling and illegal digging. We therefore considered conservation and tourism to be competing uses of a site. Among conservation features, alpine shrubs out-compete other types of alpine vegetation, and we considered that there were conflicts between these vegeta- tion types. Costs of conservation management. Options that we considered for conservation man- agement included patrolling to prevent illegal digging, monitoring changes in the states of veg- etation, and cutting back sasa-bamboo and shrubs, which would out-compete alpine vegetation in a climate change scenario. Accessibility was an important consideration for all forms of conservation management as well as for tourism. We thus considered the time required to reach each cell as a cost in the analysis. To calculate the required time, we first cal- culated the distance from the trail entrance to a cell along the climbing trail. If a cell did not include a trail within it, we also calculated the distance from the nearest trail to the cell. We then calculated the time required by assuming that it took 54 min to walk one kilometer along the trail and 120 min outside the trail. For these calculations, we used GIS data for the trails provided by the Ministry of the Environment [15]. Conservation targets. We set a conservation target for each biodiversity feature and eco- system service in eight cells. We performed 100 iterative calculations, and we summarized the frequency of selection for each cell. Consideration of scattering. We took the spatial configuration of sites into consideration

by using a boundary-length penalty or nearest-distance penalty to reduce the scattering of sites in a selected set. Results Without consideration of cost or scattering penalty (cost-off and boundary-off in SecSel), sites in the northern and southern parts of the Taisetsu Mountains were often selected as a whole, and sites in the central part were selected somewhat less frequently (Fig 4). In partic- ular, the selection frequency was high near the center of the northern and southern parts, where the elevation is high. Among the sites selected for the purpose of conserving snow meadow, fellfield, wilderness, and tourism resources, a limited number of sites were selected with high frequency, whereas many sites were selected with low frequency for the conserva- tion of shrubs. PLOS ONE SecSel, a new software tool for conservation prioritization applicable to ordinal-scale data PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247737 July 23, 2021 10 / 19