Identification of priority areas is a fundamental goal in conservation biology. Because of a lack of detailed information about species distributions, conservation targets in the Zhoushan Archipelago (China) were established on the basis of a species-area-habitat relationship (choros model) combined with an environmental cluster analysis (ECA). An environmental-distinctness index was introduced to rank areas in the dendrogram obtained with the ECA. To reduce the effects of spatial autocorrelation, the ECA was performed considering spatial constraints. To test the validity of the proposed index, a principal component analysis-based environmental diversity approach was also performed. The priority set of islands obtained from the spatially [...]
