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  CLUZ
is an ArcView GIS interface that allows users to design protected area
networks and conservation landscapes. It can be used for on-screen planning
and also acts as a link for the MARXAN
conservation planning software. It is currently being developed at DICE
and is funded by the British Government through their Darwin
Initiative for the Survival of Species.
MARXAN
has been developed by researchers at The
Ecology Centre of the University of Queensland. It has been designed
to produce efficient solutions to the problem of selecting portfolios
of planning units that meet a suite of biodiversity targets. MARXAN has
several key features which include:
- Incorporating boundary costs. Selecting planning units on their
biodiversity value alone may identify a large number of small, scattered
areas but these fragmented systems are expensive to manage and less
ecologically viable. MARXAN can overcome this problem by preferentially
selecting patches of units, so reducing the boundary length of any conservation
areas.
- Incorporating planning unit costs. The cost of including a
planning unit in a conservation portfolio may depend on a range of factors,
including size, financial value and the opportunity costs of preventing
other land-use options. MARXAN allows these data to be incorporated
into the system, so any final conservation plans minimise these costs
while still meeting the required conservation targets.
- Setting clump targets. MARXAN can be used to set targets for
clumps (also known as patches) of different biodiversity elements. This
involves specifying the minimum viable clump size, the required minimum
distance between clumps and the number of clumps that are required.
CLUZ has been designed to allow ArcView to be used to import, analyse
and display MARXAN data. It also allows the user to explore the spatial
data and interactively modify the conservation landscape plan.
Since July 2004, 735 people from 83 countries have
registered for CLUZ
 Click
here to find out more about downloading CLUZ and the CLUZ tutorial
Click here to find out more about CLUZ
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