Creating a science of nature reserve design: Perspectives from history

The science of nature reserve design has benefited from crossover between ecology and operations research since the 1980s. Applications of ecological theory had generated debate about reserve design in the 1970s and 1980s, when problems of reserve design were reformulated to draw on the methods of operations research and decision science. Advances in simulation modeling, especially models of forest growth, provided new tools for understanding ecological dynamics. A synthesis of these approaches provides ways to advance the science and facilitate its application to practical problems.