University of Kent

Conservation Land-Use Zoning software (CLUZ)

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.

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, 1181 people from 103 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