A new precedent for conservation planning

Marxan is the world-leading software that allows decision makers to structure, design, and evaluate spatial planning projects for land, freshwater, and ocean conservation. Its new intuitive design enhances the user experience in a free and open platform through improvements that strike just the right balance between usability and complexity. Designers, spatial planning experts, and developers collaborated to build workflows targeting decision-makers intent on examining complex trade-offs, collaborative planning, and employing computer-based decision-support systems to benefit nature, climate, and people.

The complexity, steep learning curve, and the large amount of time it takes to master the multifaceted geospatial software ecosystem often hinder evidence-based conservation action. In a survey of researchers for instance, 42% of respondents indicated that inadequacies in software limited their ability to handle big data better, cover broader study areas, integrate more types of data, and pursue new research. This has resulted in a poor time-to-science ratio, meaning end-users spend unreasonable amounts of time absorbed in the complexity of software, data, and deliberations, taking away from the time needed to delve into the questions they set out to answer.

The case for urgency

The clock is ticking on conservation planning. There are ambitious targets such as 30x30 and Half-Earth, yet the decade is creeping in and we urgently need to make conservation decisions to ensure the future of our earth is protected.

According to the theory of island biogeography the change in area of a habitat results in a change in the sustainable number of species. Therefore, in order to thrive, ecosystems need to be connected and protected areas around the world need to be expanded. Amboseli National Park which lies at the center of an 8,000 square km ecosystem between Kenya and Tanzania is an example of this. The protection of Amboseli’s land, swamps, and many species including its famous elephant herds constitutes a conservation success story in many ways and the park has even withstood efforts to degazette its national park status. (Alan & Flora Botting, CC BY-SA 2.0)

This need for immediate, effective action is extending conservation approaches beyond traditional decision-making processes to involve a far greater set of stakeholders worldwide, ranging from international institutions, governments, NGOs, to local communities and more.

“There’s a huge conservation movement going on at the moment. Engaging a global community on evidence-based planning is both an opportunity and a challenge. We need tools that enable a wide cross-section of the planet to make quick, good decisions about where and how to invest in biodiversity conservation. They are not going to spend four years doing a PhD, figuring out the nooks and crannies of spatial conservation planning,” remarks Vizzuality CEO Craig Mills.

To meet this growing momentum, the developing team hailing from The Nature Conservancy, Microsoft, and Vizzuality has upgraded the world’s leading spatial conservation planning tool Marxan to revolutionize geospatial software. The goal was to ensure that anyone, anywhere, can access tools to make evidence-based planning accessible, understandable, and crucially, to allow decision-makers and stakeholders to turn information into actionable plans without getting bogged down in common bottlenecks of geospatial analysis.

Marxan’s news design enhances the UX by simplifying the interface and making it more understandable. (Image credit: Vizzuality)

Marxan now offers a series of guided points, grounded in the theory of systematic conservation planning, accessible anytime during the user’s journey throughout the platform. The new layout prioritizes users’ most sought-after functionalities — improved results review and parameter setting — thus promoting immediate understanding and facilitating easy navigation for a planning workflow. Designers also prioritized concise and clear language in instructions, descriptions, labels, and terminology throughout the platform to ensure comprehension for a vast variety of potential users.

A platform to meet the moment

The new design strikes a pragmatic balance between user friendliness and Marxan’s ability to address the complexity of real-world challenges: be it protected area network planning or reconciling competing land uses. Thanks to these improvements, Marxan is now available for direct integration into recently catalyzed initiatives. One of them is the Campaign for Nature’s ‘30x30’ strategy. This initiative could help move over 100 countries closer to their conservation targets to protect 30% of global land, freshwater, and oceans by 2030.

“It’s taken the best part of a hundred years to protect 17% of the planet and we’re gonna try and basically double it in the next seven. So we cannot just rely on the technicians, experts and PhDs to do this, because there are not enough of them,” as Mills puts it. “User-centered design is important because there will be significantly more people — a hundred times, a thousand times more — that will be involved in planning and creating new conservation areas. We need to address their needs.”

Democratization of decision-support tools

What all these newcomers have in common is the desire to articulate their conservation needs and wishes. Marxan expresses these desires through mathematics and targets and comes up with solutions to fulfill these goals. Solutions range from focusing on biodiversity by ensuring species persist through time in a landscape, to minimizing the economic toll conservation may have on industries, or balancing the needs of the green energy transition. This is all while ensuring communities and stakeholders have a seat at the table along the way.

One example where Marxan is already helping to shape an evidence-based approach to planning is in the Upper Okavango River Basin. Here dozens of on-the-ground partners, scientists, and NGOs are supporting the government of Angola in the early stages of reconciling the region’s rich biodiversity and community needs. With the help of Marxan, project partners can plan for emerging energy requirements while safeguarding biodiversity and movement corridors.

The annual summer flood advances through the Upper Okavango River from the well-watered Angolan Highlands to the Okavango Delta reflected by sunlight in this NASA satellite photo. The flood water supplies forests and wetlands. (Nasa, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Spatial prioritization to support conservation action

Beyond new possibilities on the ground, Marxan is also pushing the frontier of what’s possible on the cloud. Much of the world has focused on building data repositories, mapping and visualization, and trend analysis. As the only cloud-hosted platform available that enables spatial conservation prioritization, Marxan is the first of its kind focusing on decision-making through optimization and a customized user interface.

In practice, this means that users may upload relevant data to their objectives, set targets, examine trade-offs and gaps, build scenarios and engage stakeholders through a central management dashboard. Outputs are mapped, data and decision provenance are retained, and users can access and learn from the global community of Marxan users.

The “Planning Units” stage allows users to include conservation areas and to include and exclude other areas in their conservation plan. In “Features,” users determine which kinds of features to conserve and to which extent. They then review their current selections and calibrate specific parameters and run the final scenario. This will yield results and solutions. Modifications to any of these stages can be made throughout the process. (Image credit: Marxan)

Teamwork leads to collective action

All this was made possible through an extensive collaborative iterative process and team effort that drew on experience from previous successes and failures.

Scientists benefited from software engineering guidance to think through the scalability of computational strategies, while backend engineers gained vital domain knowledge, which in turn informed better architectural decisions. This unique opportunity resulted in scientists, planners, and engineers gaining a shared understanding — an interdisciplinary engagement that rarely occurs in conservation technology and practice.

The result is a new design that enables the world’s most trusted and leading conservation software to scale its function and accessibility for the world to use. Marxan’s collaboration sets a new precedent for decision-support in the field of conservation planning. It arrives at the most critical time in human history for bringing smart decision-making to the challenges we face for climate stabilization, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being over the next decade.

Learn more about Marxan and test the newest version of the Marxan Planning Platform (MaPP).

This article is the result of collaboration between Vizzuality’s Alexander Wowra and Jacinta Hamley as well as The Nature Conservancy’s Jennifer McGowan and Kate Longley-Wood.