Questions

Why is Zonation useful? Zonation can link species distribution modelling directly to quantitative reserve planning. Zonation includes species-specific connectivity responses, natural weighting of species and several unique analysis options. It can analyse relatively large data sets in reasonable time. The analysis is deterministic and the main results of a Zonation run can be summarized in a map and a graph, which are easy to understand.

Where does data for Zonation come from? Observed or predicted occurrence of features. Typically one would enter one grid per species (or whatever biodiversity feature). Each cell would have either an observation of population size at that location, or a probability of occurrence or abundance predicted using a statistical habitat model.

What is new in Zonation v. 3? New analysis features allow, for example, ecological community-level analyses, balancing of alternative land uses, landscape condition and retention, multi-feature connectivity and analyses across multiple administrative regions.

What limitations does the software have? Zv3 has fewer limitations than Zv2. Zv3 is multithreading 64 bit software, which makes it fast and allows it to process large data set on computers running 64 bit Windows.

What does Zonation presently not do? It does not work with vector-based units. It only allows a limited set of interactive planning analyses.