Nature Reserve Selection Problem: A Tight Approximation Algorithm

  • Authors:

  • Magnus Bordewich;Charles Semple

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The Nature Reserve Selection Problem is a problem that arises in the context of studying biodiversity conservation. Subject to budgetary constraints, the problem is to select a set of regions to conserve so that the phylogenetic diversity of the set of species contained within those regions is maximized. Recently, it was shown in a paper by Moulton {\\em et al.} that this problem is NP-hard. In this paper, we establish a tight polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the Nature Reserve Section Problem. Furthermore, we resolve a question on the computational complexity of a related problem left open in Moulton {\\em et al.}