ZONATION Framework and Software for Conservation ... · Moilanen, Franco, Early, Fox, Wintle &...

CONSERVATION INFORMATICS GROUP UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI AIM AND PURPOSE

Species, habitats and ecosystems are threat-ened by habitat loss, fragmentation and cli-mate change. Resources available for conser-vation must be used efficiently to combat such threats. Zonation is a freely available framework and software for conservation resource allocation. Zonation produces a spatial priority ranking which can be used to inform conservation de-cision making. Zonation allows a direct link from high-resolution GIS data to habitat mod-elling to conservation prioritization. Analyses doable using Zonation include

EXAMPLE Expanding the conservation area network of the Finnish Forest and Park Service.

SOME ZONATION APPLICATIONS

FEATURES

Identification of conservation landscapes for butterflies in UK Moilanen, Franco, Early, Fox, Wintle & Thomas 2005. Proc. R. Soc. B, 272: 1885-1891.

In collaboration with:

Finnish Forest and Park Service Finnish Environment Institute Finnish Forest Research Institute

Contact information: Atte Moilanen email: atte.moilanen@helsinki.fi Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences Tel: +358 9 191 57753 (work) PO Box 65 (Viikinkaari 1) +358 50 3388550 (mobile) FI-00014 University of Helsinki www: http://www.helsinki.fi/science/metapop

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Figure — main Zonation output. (I) Hierarchical priority rank map for Southern Finland (resolution: 300m) based on 135 biodiversity features relevant for forest conservation (see Data). Small panels A and B show how dropping connectivity effects from the analysis influences priorities. Present conservation areas are shown by black in panel B; proposed expansions are marked by red.

Learn more about Zonation: http://www.helsinki.fi/bioscience/consplan/

Expand conservation areas by 10 000 ha

Balanced additions across forest types, ac-counting for forest age, m3, habitat produc-tivity etc; emphasis on herb-rich forest types

Account for connectivity (i) within forests and (ii) to existing conservation areas (high-quality colonization source areas).

Data Finnish Forest Research Institute’s multi-source national forest inventory data; Entire Finland at 25m resolution. Detailed habitat quality survey data from ex-isting conservation areas (from FFPS).

Many biodiversity features (species, habi-tat types, ecosystem services, etc.)

METLA

ZONATION Framework and Software for Conservation Prioritization:

Atte Moilanen, Joona Lehtomäki, Jarno Leppänen and Heini Kujala

Aims

Expansion must be on state-owned land

Identification of best parts of the landscape (for conservation)

Identification of expansions of conservation areas

Identification of least useful parts of the landscape (development there causes small-est harm for conservation)

Evaluation of existing conservation areas

Ecology and conservation benefits

Multi-criterion analysis (Zv3)

Local occurrence levels of features

Species-specific connectivity requirements

Feature priorities (weights)

Uncertainty of occurrence

Feature (species) interactions

Connectivity in river systems

Community-level analysis (Zv3)

Masks for forcibly included / excluded are-as, such as present conservation areas

Costs and administration Land cost

Multiple opportunity costs (Zv3)

Planning units

Replacement cost analysis

Zonation v2 Software

4000 (grids) + 4000 species (point data)

3 GB Windows (Win32) memory limit

~5 MB practical limit for grid size

Software & Manual freely available

Zonation v3 Software

64bit architecture — allows bigger data

Landscape grids up to ~50M cells

25000 + 25000 species

Presently beta — available late 2009

Multi-core processing for increased speed

Local quality / population size infor-mation; not only presence-absence data

Input data GIS grids describing species distributions

Priorities and connectivity responses

Point distribution data

Costs and planning units

Priority High

Low

A. No connectivity

B. With connectivity

II. Solution performance I. Priority rank map

Zonation output

Alternative planning modes: (i) additive benefit, (ii) target-based planning, (iii) core-area analysis

Zonation v1 manual from 2006

Zonation v2 manual; 4/2008

Kremen et a. 2008, Science — cover.

New conservation prioritization volume by OUP 5/2009.

Expansion of the protected areas network of Madagascar Kremen, Cameron, Moilanen et al. 2008. Science, 320: 222-226.

Evaluation of the proposed marine benthic protection areas of New Zealand Leathwick, Moilanen, Francis, Elith, Taylor, Julian and Hastie. 2008. Conservation Letters 1: 91-102.

Urban planning in the Melbourne metropolitan area Gordon, Simondson, White, Moilanen and Bekessy. 2009. Landscape and Urban Planning, in press.

Habitat restoration planning for birds in Victoria, Australia Thomson, Moilanen, McNally and Vesk. 2009. Ecological Applications, in press.

Conservation planning for the Marten in Canada with multiple connectivity requirements Rayfield, Moilanen, Fortin. 2009. Ecological Modelling 220: 725-733.

Freshwater planning using Zonation Moilanen, Leathwick, Elith 2008. Freshwater Biology, 53: 577-592.

Planning for anticipated climate change Carroll, Moilanen and Dunk. 2009. Global Change Biology, in press.

There are many other applications and papers describing Zonation methods. Please see the Zonation www site, Web-of-Science, and the following book chapter: Moilanen, Kujala and Leathwick. 2008. The Zonation framework and software for conservation Prioritization, pp. 196-210 in Moilanen, Wilson, & Possingham (eds.), “Spatial Conservation Prioritization: quantitative methods and computational tools”, Oxford University press 5/2009.

Total 135 features in a ~2.3M element grid

(II) This inset shows the second main component of Zonation output, the performance curves. While the rank map shows a spatial prioritization, the curves give information about the quality of the solu-tion in absolute terms. These curves actually demonstrate that the most valuable remaining forest are-as would have been located on private lands.