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Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and conservation is needed in many places including human-dominated landscapes. Evaluation of conflict risk between biodiversity conservation and human activities is a prerequisite for countries to develop strategies to achieve better conservation outcomes. However, quantitative methods to measure the conflict risk in large-scale areas are still lacking. Here we put forward a quantitative model in large-scale areas and produce the first continuum map of conflict risk in China. Our results show that conflict risk hotspots take up 32.86 % of China's terrestrial area, which may affect 42.98 % of China's population and more than 98 % of threaten vertebrates. Although species richness is high in these hotspot regions, only 10.69 % of them are covered by protected areas. Therefore, alternative conservation measures and proactive spatial planning are needed, especially in regions along the coastlines and around the Sichuan Basin. Especially, extraordinary attentions should be paid to urban agglomerations such as the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta. Compared to previous studies, our study quantifies the conflict risk of every gird cell, enabling the comparison among any locations. The analysis of 500 times generations shows a low sensitivity of the model as the maximum standard deviation is only 0.017. Furthermore, our model can be applied in other countries or at global scale to provide strategies for conflict governance and biodiversity conservation.

This paper describes ASCEND-II, an interactive equation based flowsheeting system capable of doing performance, design and optimization calculations with comparable ease. The optimization capability is a new, as yet unpublished, successive quadratic programming method operating in the reduced space which is the size of the degrees of freedom for the problem. Its performance is very encouraging. We spend considerable time describing the ASCEND-II system details because we believe the concepts underlying it make the system a powerful aid for design. It allows one to evolve toward the solution to a problem by allowing one to add and delete model complexity, interactively alter which variables are to be calculated and which fixed, single step through the convergence of a model, move easily from design to optimization and back, use any variable as an objective to be maximized or minimized, and to place an upper or lower bound on any variable desired.