Components

Aim and purpose

• To provide a tool for large-scale high-resolution spatial conservation planning using primarily GIS grid data

Analyses 

• Identification of optimal conservation areas
• Identification of least useful conservation areas
• Replacement cost analysis for current or proposed reserves
• Balancing of alternative land uses (New since v. 3.0)
• Combined community-level and species-level prioritization (New since v. 3.0)
• Planning modes (defining alternative perceptions of conservation value)
  - Core-area Zonation
  - Additive benefit function
  - Target-based benefit function
  - Versatile generalized benefit function
  - Random ranking

Data

• Large-scale grids with
  - Presence/absence -data
  - Probabilities of occurrence
  - Abundance/density -data
  - Uncertainty of occurrence data
  - Cost and mask layers
  - Landscape condition (New since v. 3.0)
  - Retention of biodiversity (New since v. 3.0)
• Point observation data
• Planning unit layers
• Administrative units (New since v. 3.0)
• Community similarity or connectivity matrices (New since v. 3.0)

Features

• Species priorities via weighting
• Methods for dealing with connectivity needs of species
  - Distribution Smoothing (species-specific)
  - Boundary Quality Penalty (species-specific)
  - Boundary Length Penalty
  - Directed Freshwater Connectivity (species-specific)
  - Interaction connectivity (between two distributions of features)
  - Matrix connectivity (between multiple features) (New since v. 3.0)
  - Edge effect correction (New since v. 3.0)
• Uncertainty analysis aiming at robust conservation decisions
• Clearly defined trade-offs between species
• Prioritization over multiple administrative regions (New since v. 3.0)
• Automated post-processing analyses (New since v. 3.0)
• Utilizing increased memory capacity for versatile analyses (New since v. 3.0)

Zonation v. 3.1 software

• New improved GUI
• New manual
• Now allows analysis of very large data