THE devil is certainly in the detail when it comes to planning sanctuaries for plants and animals in the wild. The amount of land available may well be less than we imagine because the scale of existing models is too large.

The land available for saving plants and animals may well be less than we imagine

At present, most models divide the world into 50-kilometre grid squares, which gives a very coarse resolution.

Changwan Seo of the University of Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues tested four models at a variety of spatial scales, using existing data for rare plants …