| title | description | layout |
|---|---|---|
Zonation |
Learn more about Zonation conservation planning software |
page |
Developed by the Conservation Biology Informatics Group (C-BIG) at the University of Helsinki Department of Biosciences
Zonation is a conservation planning framework and software that is currently used to create the South Atlantic Blueprint, one of the inputs to the Southeast Blueprint. Starting in 2022, it will be used to create a larger 12-state portion of the Southeast Blueeprint.
Zonation produces a hierarchical prioritization of the landscape based on the occurrence levels of biodiversity features in sites (cells) by iteratively removing the least valuable remaining cell while accounting for connectivity and generalized complementarity. The output of Zonation can be imported into GIS software to create maps or for further analysis. Zonation v. 4.0 can process very large data sets containing up to ~50 million grid cells with effective data.
Zonation identifies areas important for retaining habitat quality and connectivity for multiple species, indirectly aiming at species’ long-term persistence. The computational strategy of Zonation can be characterized as maximal retention of weighted, range size normalized (rarity corrected) richness. Zonation produces a complementarity-based priority ranking.