Zonation software

1. What is Zonation?

Zonation is a freely available decision support software tool for ecologically based land use planning including applications in spatial conservation planning and ecological impact avoidance. It is capable of data-rich, large-scale, high resolution spatial conservation prioritization. Zonation operates on spatial data about biodiversity features (species, habitats, ecosystem services), costs and threats. It can also utilize information about uncertainty and ecological factors such as connectivity. It is a major property of Zonation that it can maintain the many dimensions of biodiversity through prioritization. Zonation implements a broad set of methods and analyses in one package, allowing versatile use for solving many different types of problems.

NEWS

New version of the Zonation software is released 18.5.2022

Zonation 5 is arguably the most powerful approach to spatial priority ranking currently available. The software is computationally highly efficient and straightforward to use. With suitable combinations of data and analysis setups, many different analytical needs can be answered.

See here for more information, software, and materials

Spatial prioritization using Zonation software is a balancing operation

2. Typical uses of Zonation include

(These possibilities are conditional on data availability)

Planning of reserve networks
Planning of reserve network expansions
Reserve network evaluation
Decision support for land use zoning
Planning for ecological impact avoidance in development projects
Targeting of habitat restoration
Spatial planning for biodiversity offsets
Applications outside conservation

3. Data sizes

High-dimensional data sets analyzed include application on the terrestrial areas of the world at a 1 km² resolution (Di Minin et al. 2016) and almost 100 000 features in analysis (Verhagen et al. 2017). Studies that apply Zonation on high-dimensional data have been published both in Science (Kremen et al. 2008) and Nature (Pouzols et al. 2014).

4. More information

Zonation was developed by Atte Moilanen and his research group at the University of Helsinki. For more information perhaps start from the Zonation version 4 leaflet. See also the introductory manual (Di Minin et al. 2014), the Running a Zonation Planning Project manual (Lehtomäki et al. 2016) as well as Moilanen et al. (2005) and (2011), and Lehtomäki and Moilanen (2013).