Introduction

Zonation produces a hierarchical prioritization of the landscape based on the occurrence levels of features in sites (cells). It iteratively removes the least valuable remaining cell, accounting for connectivity and generalized complementarity in the process. The output of Zonation can be imported into GIS software to create maps or for further analysis. Zonation can be run on very large data; Zonation v. 3 can process landscapes with up to ~50 million grid cells with effective data.

Here is an example of basic landscape ranking done with the Zonation program. Areas are zoned to graduate colors based on their conservation value; most valuable areas for conservation are shown as red. You can also use the program to select a certain fraction of the best landscape in case of budget restrictions or to view the areas needed for the protection of a certain fraction, e.g. 30%, of the distribution of each species.

During computation Zonation produces detailed information about the decrease in species (or whatever features) distributions as landscape is lost.

Zonation includes several techniques for dealing with species-specific connectivity requirements. It includes capability for dealing with structural connectivity and home-range requirements, long-distance kernel type connectivity and directed connectivity for riverine environments. Matrix connectivity allows accounting for connectivity contributions of multiple features simultaneously.

Uncertainty analysis in Zonation accounts for certainty in biological information in the spatial planning process. Robust-optimal solutions are such that have both relatively high conservation value and high confidence in that information.

The example area here is a 120 x 140 km² region in eastern Australia. The data includes 7 priority fauna species and a 649 x 555 grid at 200 m cell resolution (courtesy of Dr. Brendan Wintle, University of Melbourne, and the Hunter Region Organization of Councils, HROC).