Advanced Spatial Planning: Intro to Marxan w Zones and Connectivity

About this Course

As the world prepares to meet ambitious goals for global biodiversity, we need to scale our investments in systematic conservation planning. The use of free and open decision-support tools, such as Marxan, is critical to building scenarios, understanding trade-offs and ensuring transparent and robust decision-making for our planet, communities, and economies.

Together, the Marxan Leadership Team, with support from experts around the world, have created this training program which will cover the advanced applications of planning as they relate to multi-objective zoning and operationalizing connectivity into spatial prioritization.

While previous experience with Marxan or spatial prioritization tools is encouraged, it is not a prerequisite to enroll in this class.

In this 3 hour online short course we will cover:

• Fundamentals of Advanced Spatial Planning
• Concepts and technical understanding of Marxan with Zones (Desktop)
• Operationalizing Connectivity data into spatial prioritization
• Overview of case studies and running anlayses on your desktop

You will get the fundamentals of systematic conservation planning, hands on-learning, technical know-how, and take-home activities to help you get started. Small class sizes means we will have time to discuss and answer questions about your conservation planning challenges.

Classes will be run online in English as plenary lectures, activities and discussions.

I look forward to helping you help the planet.

*Ticket price does not include Eventbrite fees

*Students enrolling must register with university email accounts to qualify for discounted price

About your Instructor

Dr. Jennifer McGowan is the Global Managing Director of Marxan. She is committed to teaching conservation planning theory and skills to build capacity in governments, the private sector, and NGOs to embrace systematic conservation planning in biodiversity, climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and sustainable development for land, freshwater, and ocean systems.

Jennifer uses aspects of mapping, spatial ecology, economics, operations research, policy and decision theory to make transparent, repeatable and robust decisions about the allocation of resources to inform conservation actions on the ground. She applies these skills at global and local scales to help solve a wide array of challenges, from optimizing protected area network design to prioritizing countries for conservation finance initiatives to deliver large return-on-investment benefits from biodiversity protection.

She holds affiliate research positions at Yale's Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and The University of Queensland's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. You can find out more about Jennifer's research here.