Systematic conservation planning in the eastern English Channel: comparing the Marxan and Zonation decision-support tools

Abstract

Delavenne, J., Metcalfe, K., Smith, R. J., Vaz, S., Martin, C. S., Dupuis, L., Coppin, F., and Carpentier, A. 2012. Systematic conservation planning in the eastern English Channel: comparing the Marxan and Zonation decision-support tools. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 69: 75–83. The systematic conservation approach is now commonly used for the design of efficient marine protected area (MPA) networks, and identifying these priority areas often involves using specific conservation-planning software. Several such software programmes have been developed in recent years, each differing in the underlying algorithms used. Here, an investigation is made into whether the choice of software influences the location of priority areas by comparing outputs from Marxan and Zonation, two widely used conservation-planning, decision-support tools. Using biological and socio-economic data from the eastern English Channel, outputs are compared and it is shown that the two software packages identified similar sets of priority areas, although the relatively wide distribution of habitat types and species considered offered much flexibility. Moreover, the similarity increased with increasing spatial constraint, especially when using real-world cost data, suggesting that the choice of cost metric has a greater influence on conservation-planning analyses than the choice of software. However, Marxan generally produced more efficient results and Zonation produced results with greater connectivity, so the most appropriate software package will depend on the overall goals of the MPA planning process.

History of benthic research in the English Channel: From general patterns of communities to habitat mosaic description

“…The main objectives of the CHARM INTERREG project were to develop an atlas as a 'toolkit' to help in decision-making and planning for both sound governance and sustainable management of the English Channel's marine resources and human activities (Carpentier et al, 2005(Carpentier et al, , 2009Martin et al, 2009Martin et al, , 2010. In addition, research on benthic communities included sensitive habitats, and a knowledge of their distribution and functioning remained an important challenge for marine protected areas (MPA) (Delavenne, 2012;Delavenne et al, 2012). Delavenne et al (2012) had compared two software packages, respectively Marxan and Zonation taking into account biological and socio-economic data to identify the best arrangement of protected sites to create an MPA network at the scale of the eastern basin of the English Channel.…”

“…In addition, research on benthic communities included sensitive habitats, and a knowledge of their distribution and functioning remained an important challenge for marine protected areas (MPA) (Delavenne, 2012;Delavenne et al, 2012). Delavenne et al (2012) had compared two software packages, respectively Marxan and Zonation taking into account biological and socio-economic data to identify the best arrangement of protected sites to create an MPA network at the scale of the eastern basin of the English Channel. MPA appeared to be a possible tool in the context of the ecosystem-basedmanagement.…”

“…This is the last and final result of the HABITAT approach representing the different benthic habitat surfaces. The map of benthic habitats will serve later as a tool for the users and managers to develop activities such as aggregate extraction, implementation of Renewable Marine Energies (wind farms and tidal turbines) and protect marine areas (Delavenne, 2012;Delavenne et al, 2012). The generalisation and application of Geographic Information Systems allow us to draw up maps of benthic communities from a marine area using different scales of representation, from some km 2 up to the whole English Channel, as proposed by Coggan and Diesing (2011), for the EUNIS classification levels 3 and 4, which is now a benchmark for this area.…”

A spatial conservation prioritization approach for protecting marine birds given proposed offshore wind energy development

“…SCP software packages, such as Zonation, have previously been used to make real-world conservation decisions in terrestrial, riverine, marine and urban environments (Kremen et al, 2008;Leathwick et al, 2008;Lehtomäki et al, 2009;Leathwick et al, 2010;Bekessy et al, 2012;Delavenne et al, 2012). We chose to use Zonation because it does not require individual conservation targets to be defined a priori for each biodiversity feature of interest and it allows for a combination of different types of SDMs (Moilanen et al, 2005;Kukkala and Moilanen, 2013;Lehtomäki and Moilanen, 2013) which in our case was essential given the diversity of marine birds.…”

“…We then integrated these predictions (and associated model uncertainties) using spatial conservation prioritization (SCP) software (Zonation; Moilanen et al, 2005) to identify sites with high conservation priority to marine birds to satisfy the requirements of ecosystembased MSP. This approach has been applied to the development and evaluation of marine protected areas (Leathwick et al, 2008;Delavenne et al, 2012;Oppel et al, 2012), but to our knowledge has not been used to guide siting decisions of OWEDs to minimize risk to marine animals, including marine birds.…”