Building a team

The number and people required for a project, and their skills will depend heavily on its exact nature. Take a moment and consider again the specifics of your project; this will help you to decide for example whether you need to involve decision-makers or stakeholders from the outset. Even if this is not required, in our experience, most projects benefit from having access to a diverse range of skills, reflecting the integrative nature of most prioritisation analyses. Therefore, you will typically want to assemble a team in which people with different skillsets will complement each other in different roles. In the following, we list the most common roles that need to be filled in a Zonation project. Note that the roles given here are approximate and often a single person can act in several roles.

A coordinator is someone who coordinates the planning and execution of the project and interacts with stakeholders and decision-makers. Since expert-elicited information often plays a big role in Zonation projects, good facilitation and communication skills are essential for a coordinator. A coordinator is especially important when constructing a process that supports operational conservation planning, and where achieving clarity and institutional agreement around project objectives is required.

A science expert is a person who has a background in one or several of the relevant scientific fields such as ecology, conservation, decision analysis, geography, etc. This person’s main responsibility is to lead the construction of the model of spatial prioritization (see Chapter 3) in close collaboration with the rest of the team. While expertise with Zonation is not the key-asset of a person in this role, the science expert should have sufficient understanding of Zonation and its requirements to be able to work effectively with other team members.

A Zonation expert is person who has experience in operating Zonation and who has a good understanding of its conceptual underpinnings. The main responsibility of this person is to lead the development of an analytical model within Zonation that addresses the high-level objectives of the project (Chapter 2). Furthermore, skills in data management and processing, usually with a GIS, will come handy.

Unless the Zonation expert is also an expert in data processing using GIS, then one or more GIS-experts will also be needed. Significant effort is frequently needed in the processing of spatial data into the format and content required by analysis.

Strictly speaking, having the roles defined separately as above is not always a prerequisite for running a successful Zonation project - sometimes a single person will have to manage all four - but the separation of responsibilities will help to distribute the workload and make the execution more efficient. Typically finding someone with enough experience with Zonation is the hardest thing; starting from scratch can be challenging, but is achievable given the amount of published knowledge in the scientific literature, help documentation such as what you are reading currently, and through collaboration and support from other experienced Zonation users.