The Nature Reserve Selection Problem (NRS) is a problem that arises in the context of conservation biology. Subject to budgetary constraints, the problem is to select a set of conservation areas to preserve so that the phylogenetic diversity of the species contained within those areas is maximized. It was recently shown that NRS is NP-hard. In this talk, we give a tight polynomial-time approximation algorithm for NRS and describe a closely-related problem for which little is known.
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