Marxan

With the use of stochastic optimisation routines (Simulated Annealing) Marxan generates spatial reserve systems that achieve particular biodiversity representation goals with reasonable optimality.

Computationally, Marxan provides solutions to a conservation version of the 0-1 knapsack problem, where the objects of interest are potential reserve sites with given biological attributes.

Through the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management programme (BIOPAMA), funded by the European Union, the Joint Research Centre worked closely with The Nature Conservancy to prototype a web-based Marxan platform that improves accessibility to non-experts and supports our common vision of providing accessible tools for evidence-based conservation planning.

This led to a partnership with Microsoft in 2020, which aims to scale Marxan's infrastructure for global accessibility and empowering users with the tools and data they need to make smarter decisions for the planet.

In late 2020 and early 2021 Microsoft's Azure Quantum team made several open source contributions to Marxan resulting in increased performance when running on multi-core machines and cloud environments.

MARXAN has been used extensively by The Nature Conservancy, and is a major part of the systematic planning tools being used in the Global Marine Initiative.

For example, sites may be connected through processes such as larval dispersal, animal migrations, and genetic flows which are desirable objectives in conservation plans.

Some examples where it has been used includes planning for Iberian herptile conservation while accounting for uncertainty in their predicted distributions due to climate change,[33] and accounting for the inherent uncertainty associated with coral reef habitat maps in conservation planning, in the Kubulau District fisheries management area, Fiji.

[37] Helpful tools developed by Trevor Wiens from Apropos Information Systems are available for both ArcGIS and QGIS users.