AquaBiota offer the possibility to use Marxan (and Marxan with Zones) to develop decision support for spatial marine management. Marxan is a decision support tool that is used for marine zoning. It has been developed to find a network of areas that meet biodiversity targets and are relatively socially and economically cost-effective for conservation management by minimizing conflicts with other activities. It is also possible to use Marxan for many other demandstasks, such as to identifying suitable locations for aquaculture or wind farms.
One of the main advantages with this type of analysis is that it enables the needs demands of many different activities to be analyzed together with objectives for conservation and other values. Marxan is especially useful in cases where the possible solutions are too many or too complex to identify with manual methods.
The results can be used both for updating existing marine and coastal zone plans and to develop new material for a previously unplanned areas. Marxan assists with compiling information about biological features, human impact, and spatial protection in a structured way, which also provides good communication basis for consultation processes and the like.
Relevant publications:
Stelzenmüller, V. et.al. 2014: Assessing uncertainty associated with the monitoring and evaluation of spatially managed areas.
Mar Policy, 51:151-162. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2014.08.001.
Fyhr, F., Nilsson, Å., Nyström Sandman, A., 2013: A review of Ocean Zoning tools and Species distribution modelling methods for Marine Spatial Planning, MARMONI project report.
Stelzenmüller, V. et.al. 2013: Monitoring and evaluation of spatially managed areas: A generic framework for implementation of ecosystem based marine management and its application. Marine Policy, 37:149-164. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2012.04.012.