Abstract Faced with natural habitat degradation, fragmentation, and destruction, it is a major challenge for environmental managers to implement sustainable land use policies promoting socioeconomic development and natural habitat conservation in a balanced way. Relying on artificial intelligence and operational research, reserve selection and design models can be of assistance. This paper introduces a partitioning approach based on Constraint Programming (CP) for the reserve selection and design problem, dealing with both coverage and complex spatial constraints. Moreover, it introduces the first CP formulation of the buffer zone constraint, which can be reused to compose more complex spatial constraints. This approach has been evaluated in a real-world dataset addressing the problem of forest fragmentation in New Caledonia, a biodiversity hotspot where managers are gaining interest in integrating these methods into their decisional processes. Through several scenarios, it showed expressiveness, flexibility, and ability to quickly find solutions to complex questions