Conservation Triage: Budget-Constrained Species Prioritization

Conservation Budget

Annual budget $8.0M

Species Allocation

Outcome

Budget used

$0.0M / $8.0M

Biodiversity saved

0.00 units

Time Simulation

How it works

This is the Project Prioritization Protocol (PPP), the marginal cost-effectiveness method conservation agencies (e.g. NZ's Department of Conservation) use to allocate a fixed budget across species that cannot all be fully funded.

f_i = min(1, x_i / c_i)               funded fraction
p_i(x) = p0_i · e^(−k·f_i)            annual extinction risk after funding
ΔEV_i = w_i · (p0_i − p_i(x_i))       expected biodiversity saved
maximize Σ ΔEV_i  subject to  Σ x_i ≤ B

x_i — dollars you allocate to species i (its slider).
c_i — cost to fully protect it (nets/patrols/habitat, per year).
p0_i — baseline annual extinction probability with zero funding.
w_i — biodiversity weight (evolutionary distinctiveness — how irreplaceable the species' lineage is).
Because risk falls exponentially with funding, the first dollars spent on a neglected species buy far more expected biodiversity than the last dollars spent on an already well-funded one — the curve has diminishing returns.
Auto-Optimize spends the budget in small increments, each time funding whichever species currently has the highest marginal benefit per dollar (ΔEV/Δx) — the discrete version of the calculus condition that the optimal allocation equalizes marginal returns across all funded species.
Run years plays the population forward stochastically: each year a species independently faces its computed extinction-risk probability as a chance of a sharp population crash; otherwise it grows logistically toward its historic carrying capacity. Illustrative parameters — a teaching model, not a wildlife-agency forecast.

Year 0

Vaquita Kākāpō Sumatran rhino Iberian lynx

⚠ Couldn't load the 3D engineThree.js failed to load from the CDN. Check your connection and reload.