A potential strategy to resolve conservation conflicts on lands outside of nature reserves is to spatially rearrange agricultural and native vegetative parcels so that the biodiversity value of the landscape is improved without having adverse effects on agricultural productivity. Global optimization methods have been used to identify the best spatial arrangement for a given project goal, but these methods are silent

regarding how to reach the optimum from the initial landscape. First, we describe a novel theoretical methodology that can be used to develop a rearrangement schedule to obtain a landscape that sustains more biodiversity than the initial landscape, and also promotes the persistence of ecological and evolutionary processes throughout the transition stage. Second, we discuss our attempts at extending the methodology to assess the ability of conservation policies in the

Brazilian Forest Code to accomplish biodiversity objectives. The very diverse forest-grassland ecosystems of southern Brazil will be the case study for both parts of this talk, but the approaches discussed are applicable to a wide range of ecosystems.