R help - Feb 2006 - R and marine protected areas: algorithms for site selection

Dear listers,

a central problem in conservation biology is the selection of sites in 
reserve network design.
many algorithms have been published, and I was wondering any have been 
implemented in R.
I did not seen anything on CRAN or R-help, or on the web in general.

Best regards, Eric

Eric Pante
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College of Charleston, Grice Marine Laboratory
205 Fort Johnson Road, Charleston SC 29412
Phone: 843-953-9190 (lab)  -9200 (main office)
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	"On ne force pas la curiosite, on l'eveille ..."
	Daniel Pennac

Hi - I looked briefly a little while ago for R interaction with linear 
programming tools. There is limited support for the lp_solve solver 
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/lpsolve) in the package lpSolve, but 
it doesn't give full access to the external solver's capabilities. 
Other than that, you may want to look at the Gnu Linear Programming Kit 
(http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/glpk.html) and MathProg or Zimpl 
(http://www.zib.de/koch/zimpl/), and be prepared to get R to write text 
files that can then be run externally. Ugly, but you may get somewhere.

If you find anything better that integrates R and linear programming, 
I'd be interested to hear about it.

Regards,

Rich


> Dear listers,
>
> a central problem in conservation biology is the selection of sites in
> reserve network design.
> many algorithms have been published, and I was wondering any have been
> implemented in R.
> I did not seen anything on CRAN or R-help, or on the web in general.
>
> Best regards, Eric
>
> Eric Pante
--------------------
Rich Grenyer, Ph.D.
Biology Department - University of Virginia
Gilmer Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
VA 22904
United States of America

tel: (+1) 434 982 5629
fax: (+1) 434 982 5626
http://faculty.virginia.edu/gittleman/rich