Nature Reserve Selection Problem: A Tight Approximation Algorithm

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on computational biology and bioinformatics Vol. 5; no. 2; pp. 275 - 280
• Main Authors: Bordewich, M., Semple, C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.04.2008; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Approximation algorithms; Biodiversity; Combinatorial algorithms; Computational Biology; Computational complexity; Conservation of Natural Resources; Costs; Ecosystem; Genetic Variation; Greedy algorithms; Joining processes; Mathematics; Models, Genetic; Phylogeny; Polynomials; Protection; Trees; Trees; Combinatorial algorithms
• ISSN: 1545-5963; 1557-9964; 2374-0043; 1557-9964
• DOI: 10.1109/TCBB.2007.70252

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 be conserved so that the phylogenetic diversity of the set of species contained within those regions is maximized. Recently, it has been shown in a paper by Moulton 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 by Moulton et al.