Welcome!

Version 3.0 available!

A new version of Zonation is now available online. Zonation v. 3.0 has several improvements and new features to facilitate conservation planning.

New analytical features include:

• Alternative land-uses allowing consideration of needs of multiple conflicting land uses or opportunity costs. In practice, features in opposition to biodiversity conservation can be assigned negative weights.
• Community level analysis with the focus on community composition. Overlap in species composition is accounted for by similarity expansion.
• Landscape condition and retention. Integral part of community level analysis but also applicable to species level analysis.
• Administrative units to allow planning over multiple administrative regions with different preferences.
• Automated post-processing analyses for identifying management landscapes and comparing two solutions in terms of overlap and cell removal order.
• Matrix connectivity to allow accounting for connectivity to multiple features simultaneously.
• Removal mask layer has a new format and improved function. Multiple levels of prioritization hierarchy are now possible.

New computational features include:

• Graphical User Interface. Zonation v.3.0 has a completely new GUI, mostly designed and implemented by Jarno Leppänen. The new GUI includes a facility for administrating Zonation projects, which may consist of multiple runs. The GUI also includes a facility for examining and editing input files, and for checking of the consistency of input file sets.
• 64 bit version that allows the use of lots of memory on 64 bit Windows environments
• Multithreaded computations for improved performance

As Zonation v. 3.0 also includes technical improvements and corrections, it is highly recommended that all users should update their current software.This software is numbered beta because of the high number of new features it is possible that some bugs have escaped us. Perhaps develop your analyses in stages and verify that results remain sensible after combinations of new features are activated. Final v3 release is expected in the autumn.

Download the new Zonation v. 3.0 here!

The Zonation software has been designed and implemented by Atte Moilanen and Jarno Leppänen. Documentation and examples have been prepared by Heini Kujala, Laura Meller, Jarno Leppänen and Atte Moilanen.

Zonation - A multi-approach tool for conservation planning

Zonation is a framework and software for spatial conservation prioritization; it is a decision support tool for conservation planning. Zonation identifies areas important for retaining habitat quality and connectivity for multiple species, indirectly aiming at species' long-term persistence. The computational strategy of Zonation can be characterized as maximal retention of weighted, range size normalized (rarity corrected) richness. Zonation produces a complementarity-based priority ranking. The operation of Zv3 is explained in the 300 page comprehensive manual.