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Human development is a threat to biodiversity and conservation organizations (COs) are purchasing land to protect areas for biodiversity preservation. COs have limited budgets and cannot purchase all the land necessary to perfectly preserve biodiversity, and human activities are uncertain, so exact developments are unpredictable. We propose a multistage, robust optimization problem with a data-driven hierarchical-structured uncertainty set which captures the endogenous nature of the binary (0-1) human land use uncertain parameters to help COs choose land parcels to purchase to minimize the worst-case human impact on biodiversity. In the proposed approach, the problem is formulated as a game between COs, which choose parcels to protect with limited budgets, and the human development, which will maximize the loss to the unprotected parcels. We leverage the cellular automata model to simulate the development based on climate data, land characteristics, and human land use data. We use the simulation to build data-driven uncertainty sets. We demonstrate that an equivalent formulation of the problem can be obtained that presents exogenous uncertainty only and where uncertain parameters only appear in the objective. We leverage this reformulation to propose a conservative $K$-adaptability reformulation of our problem that can be solved routinely by off-the-shelf solvers like Gurobi or CPLEX. The numerical results based on real data show that the proposed method reduces conservation loss by 19.46% on average compared to standard approaches used in practice for biodiversity conservation. 

ABSTRACT Latch-mediated spring actuation (LaMSA) is used by small organisms to produce high acceleration movements. Mathematical models predict that acceleration increases as LaMSA systems decrease in size. Adult mantis shrimp use a LaMSA mechanism in their raptorial appendages to produce extremely fast strikes. Until now, however, it was unclear whether mantis shrimp at earlier life-history stages also strike using elastic recoil and latch mediation. We tested whether larval mantis shrimp (Gonodactylaceus falcatus) use LaMSA and, because of their smaller size, achieve higher strike accelerations than adults of other mantis shrimp species. Based on microscopy and kinematic analyses, we discovered that larval G. falcatus possess the components of, and actively use, LaMSA during their fourth larval stage, which is the stage of development when larvae begin feeding. Larvae performed strikes at high acceleration and speed (mean: 4.133×105 rad s−2, 292.7 rad s−1; 12 individuals, 25 strikes), which are of the same order of magnitude as for adults – even though adult appendages are up to two orders of magnitude longer. Larval strike speed (mean: 0.385 m s−1) exceeded the maximum swimming speed of similarly sized organisms from other species by several orders of magnitude. These findings establish the developmental timing and scaling of the mantis shrimp LaMSA mechanism and provide insights into the kinematic consequences of scaling limits in tiny elastic mechanisms.