CLUZ overview

Therefore, there is a general need to develop conservation landscapes that allow the maintenance of biodiversity whilst minimising impacts on the livelihoods of local people (Driver et al, 2003). The best way of achieving this is to use systematic conservation planning techniques, as these allow stakeholders to develop land-use plans in a transparent manner by going through the following steps:

1. Compile data on the biodiversity of the planning region
   
   
2. Identify conservation goals for the planning region
   
   
3. Review existing conservation areas
   
   
4. Select additional conservation areas
   
   
5. Implement conservation actions
   
   
6. Maintain the required values of conservation areas

( Margules & Pressey, 2000)

CLUZ and MARXAN are two pieces of software that have been developed to allow this type of planning to be carried out by conservation practitioners and researchers. They work by dividing the planning region into a series of planning units, listing the distribution of the conservation features found in the study planning, setting targets for the amount of each feature to be included in the conservation landscape and using computer software to identify the portfolio of units that best meet these targets.

The three main ways that CLUZ can be used to develop these conservation land-use plans are:

1) Using MARXAN to identify near-optimal conservation landscapes

MARXAN identifies near-optimal combinations of planning units that meet specified conservation targets. It does this by running the same analysis a set number of times and identifying the most efficient solution. Incorporating boundary costs into the process ensures that patches of contiguous units are selected, which increases the real-world applicability of the final outputs.

2) Using MARXAN to produce irreplaceability scores
MARXAN also records the number of times that each unit is selected in each of the different runs. This number acts as an irreplaceability score, so that units that are selected in every run could be considered irreplaceable. CLUZ can display these scores and the resultant maps are valuable for conservation planning because they give a value for each unit, rather than showing a unit as either being part or not part of the most efficient solution.

3) Using CLUZ to interactively create and modify existing plans
CLUZ can also be used to develop and modify conservation plans by interactively adding and removing units. These interactive functions automatically update information on how the selected units meet the conservation targets. CLUZ can also be used to display the distribution of each biodiversity element and to identify suitable units for swapping with selected units that are in unsuitable locations.

Click here to find out more about downloading CLUZ and the CLUZ tutorial

Click here to find out more about what CLUZ can do