Running a Zonation Planning Project

Joona Lehtomäki
Atte Moilanen
Tuuli Toivonen
John Leathwick

Preface

A spatial conservation prioritization project using Zonation involves many different stages out of which the technical phase of running Zonation is just one. The exact underpinnings and features of Zonation have been extensively described elsewhere, most notably in the technical manual (Moilanen et al., 2014) and in many publications on the topic. Furthermore, setting up a simple Zonation analysis and getting the software up and running quickly has been described in the easy-to-approach document "A quick introduction to Zonation" (Di Minin et al., 2014). Until now, however, what has been lacking is a general introduction to the planning, construction and execution of a spatial conservation planning project using the Zonation, with a particular emphasis on the steps required both before and after the actual Zonation analysis. This document aims to provide that information. All of the aforementioned documents complement each other and in case you are developing your own Zonation analyses, we recommend keeping all of them nearby.

In Chapter 1, we begin by revisiting things you should consider well before even thinking about the nitty-gritty details of implementing and executing Zonation analyses. We will be looking at whether Zonation is the right tool for your job and the types of resources that you will require. In Chapter 2, we will discuss a very important aspect of all conservation planning and prioritization projects: setting the objectives. Without being explicit about your objectives there is a high chance that the results will not be as informative as you would like. In Chapter 3, we will be looking at how to translate a set of often relatively abstract and broad objectives into a conservation prioritization project using Zonation. In other words, we will be discussing how to use your data, expertise and tools to best meet your objectives. This will include consideration of spatial data required for a prioritisation analysis, including descriptions of biodiversity features and other relevant factors, such as habitat condition and costs. In Chapter 4, we will explore key aspects of working with real data, the stage in which you will most probably spend the most time. In Chapter 5, we continue directly from Chapter 4 and look at how Zonation analyses are typically developed, starting with a simple model but progressively making it both more realistic and complex through the consideration of other factors. Here we will also share our experience regarding how to organize your projects. We will not be spending any time on the details of Zonation itself, as these are already well covered by the manual and the “Quick introduction to Zonation”-document. Instead, in Chapter 6, we will skip over the details of running Zonation and continue directly to the topic of visualizing, interpreting and validating the results. Finally, in Chapter 7, we will use several real-life planning examples to show how Zonation can be used as part of operational spatial planning both for conservation and for more general land use planning.

Throughout this document, we assume that readers will have general familiarity with both spatial conservation prioritization and Zonation, and provide pointers to background literature only where it is directly helpful. It is also worth pointing out that many of the issues that we discuss, related to both project planning and technical implementation, are not specific to Zonation, but could also be useful when implementing such analyses with other conservation planning tools. However, each real-life conservation prioritization project will invariably have its own quirks and peculiarities, so it is impossible to give detailed “how-to” instructions that would fit all occasions. Consider this document therefore a general introduction, which will give you a good starting point for using Zonation in your own projects.

Summary

Zonation is decision support software for spatial land use planning. It was originally developed for solving various problems around spatial conservation resource allocation, and it is capable of data rich, large scale, high-resolution spatial analysis. Today, applications of Zonation are not limited to conservation; it can also address variable problems in ecologically aware land use planning, including such as spatial impact avoidance and targeting of biodiversity offsets. The Zonation software implements a set of interrelated techniques in one package. It can in analysis account for many factors, such as multiple costs, habitat condition and ecological connectivity. While Zonation can flexibly address various spatial planning problems, it does not do statistical species distribution modelling (SDM) or spatial population viability analysis (SPVA). Nevertheless, outputs from SDM or SPVA can be used as inputs for Zonation.

If you have need for a spatial prioritization analysis, the first thing you need to do is to assess whether Zonation is the right tool for the job. Problems frequently addressed with Zonation include the identification of ecologically important areas for reserve network expansion or identification of the ecologically least important areas for impact avoidance of development projects. Zonation can be used for both scientific research and real-life planning. Explicitly defining the domain of use will help you with setting up the project.

Using Zonation in a planning project requires certain human and other resources. While details will heavily depend on the nature of you project, you will probably need a team of people with different skills. In addition to knowing how to use Zonation, experts in related scientific fields, project coordination, and spatial data management are often needed. In case your project aims at delivering real-life decision-support, engaging with relevant decision-makers and stakeholders is crucial. Very often, knowledge production among a group of people with varying backgrounds, objectives and expertise is one of the main outcomes of a planning project. Having sufficient technical (i.e. computer and storage) capacity is also required, as is having the actual spatial data for the Zonation analyses. Overall, the time required for running a Zonation planning project varies from few weeks to several years.

Once you have established that Zonation might be a suitable tool for you conservation planning project, you need to establish clear and explicit objectives for the project. This means first defining the high-level objectives such as “expand the reserve network by 5%” followed by translating these high-level objectives into components of the actual Zonation analysis. These components – which biodiversity features are used, how they are weighted, how connectivity is dealt with, are costs included, etc. – jointly constitute a model of spatial prioritization. This model in principle also defines what kind of data are needed, but in practice, the availability of data also restricts what kind of model can be constructed.

Essentially a Zonation analysis is an implementation of a particular model of spatial prioritization. Before doing the actual analysis, relevant data need to be acquired, verified, and pre-processed into the same spatial extent and resolution. This stage is frequently the most time-consuming part of a planning project, especially when inputs include many biodiversity features with high-resolution distribution information. Automating the pre-processing steps when possible and paying attention to data management planning can save you time and trouble.

Setting up and running Zonation requires planning as well. Instead of including all the components of the model of spatial prioritization into a single Zonation analysis at one go, it is useful to develop a sequence of increasingly complex development variants. This way you can get a better view on how a particular analysis option, like the inclusion of ecological connectivity, influences the prioritization. While Zonation does not enforce a particular way of organizing your input and output files, we recommend following certain best practices such as placing individual development variants into subdirectories under your project folders etc.

Visualization and interpretation should directly serve the intended use of the results and these needs vary depending on whether the results are intended for scientific publication or real-life implementers. In addition to producing the standard output, Zonation is capable of performing useful post-processing operations on the results. Alternatively, the prioritization results can be post-processed with external software tools such as the R programming language. Using the different post-processing techniques, you can create whatever planning products best support the objectives of your project. Your results should also be subject to continuous verification between the different technical stages of the project, as well as final validation to check that your analyses actually address the high-level objectives you established in the beginning.

An overall successful Zonation planning project often requires running several individual planning stages in an iterative fashion. Running the Zonation software is just one, albeit an important, stage. Ultimately, having the capacity to run a successful Zontation planning project in any organization requires that all of the project stages can be addressed. In return, it is possible to achieve not only useful spatial conservation plans supported by data, but also increased knowledge sharing and understanding between all the stakeholders participating in the planning project. Frequently, this learning is as valuable as the prioritization outcome itself.

Acknowledgements

Tuomas Haapalehto, Santtu Kareksela, Olena Kovalenko, Aija Kukkala, Peter Kullberg and Victoria Veach have kindly contributed content to this document and/or helped by commenting earlier versions of the text. We thank all collaborators and students for numerous discussions over the years that have inspired our development and use of Zonation. The development of this document was supported by the European Research Council, ERC-StG grant 260393 to A.M. (project GEDA), the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence programme 2012–2017, grant 250444, the Finnish Ministry of Environment via Metsähallitus Natural Heritage Services, and the University of Helsinki.

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Version 1.0, February 2016

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