Part III - Questions about Zonation and analysis setups
Atte Moilanen, Joona Lehtomäki, Heini Kujala,
Anni Arponen and Laura Meller
Conservation Biology Informatics Group
http://cbig.it.helsinki.fi
Finnish Centre of Excellence in Metapopulation Biology
www.helsinki.fi/science/metapop
Dept. Biological and Environmental sciences
P.O. Box 65, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
Below, there are different topics about Zonation use. Each topic is introduced briefly and then there
are questions, which you should try to answer based on the presentations you have heard, your own
experience and other material, such as the Zonation manual pdf.
You will have a few minutes to think about each question. The idea is not that you should get the
correct answer or all correct answers. The main thing is that you think yourself about relevant
factors. Then the teachers will introduce their suggestion for a solution, after which alternatives and
other suggestions can be discussed.
The aim of these exercises are to (i) help you learn about factors and data that you may wish to
consider when setting up a Zonation run, (ii) introduce you to the most common analysis setups,
(iii) provide links to literature, and (iv) introduce you to the limitations of Zonation. It is possible to
do quite a lot with an imaginative analysis setup!
Answers to the following questions are provided in another document.
Questions 1: Selecting best areas for conservation.
The basic function of a conservation prioritization (or site selection) software is to find areas that
are of interest for nature protection action. Typically, these would be the “best” areas of the
landscape based on some data about the distributions of species. [One could also use data about
distributions and the naturalness of habitat types.] There are many relatively simple questions
related to this.
Q1.1. How does one select best areas for conservation from a Zonation solution? What about the
quality of the solution – where can you find information from?
Q1.2. What is the meaning of the definition of marginal loss (cell removal rule) from the point of
view of the Zonation solution? Why do different cell removal rules lead to different solutions? As a
reminder, the removal rules were Core-Area Zonation CAZ; Additive Benefit Function analysis
ABF; Targeting benefit function analysis TBF; Generalized Benefit Function GBF.
Q1.3. Can cost be accounted for in the prioritization process? What is the conceptual difference
between accounting for cost or not?
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Q1.4. Can Zonation be used for targeting of habitat maintenance or restoration? What is the
interpretation of the input data in this case?
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Questions 2. Selecting best areas for competing (economic) land-uses.
While selecting areas for conservation seem like the primary function of prioritization, it can in fact
be quite relevant to identify areas where alternative land-uses do not harm biodiversity much.
Q2.1. How can one, using Zonation, select areas that are least useful for biodiversity (assuming the
areas are lost due to economic activity).
Q2.2. Cost can be accounted for in this process. But, what if there are multiple costs, such as cost
for agriculture, cost for forestry, etc. Can multiple costs be accounted for?
Questions 3. Extending conservation areas networks.
Most real life planning situations are about extending an existing conservation area network. The
analysis setup is for this problem is rather similar to that of selection of conservation areas, but there
are a few complications.
Q3.1. You have an existing conservation area network. Then there is data through the landscape.
How would you select extensions to the network using Zonation? What relevant considerations and
analysis features are there? How about connectivity in particular?
Questions 4. How about evaluating proposed conservation areas, or areas that will be set
outside of conservation use.
This is one common analysis type.
Q4.1. Someone has proposed a set of areas as the extension of the protected area network. Can you
evaluate the quality of these extensions?
Questions 5. About connectivity.
Connectivity can be very important in prioritization. Different connectivity methods and analyses
are covered in the Z manual and publications.
Q5.1. Make a list of different analysis features to account for connectivity in Zonation. How can
these features be used in the selection of conservation areas or areas for (economic) development?
Questions 6. About uncertain inputs.
Typically a computer program will produce an output whatever you feed in. It is so for Zonation as
well. Garbage in, garbage out. It would display overconfidence to maintain the opinion that one’s
biological data about distributions etc is fully accurate. If fact, distribution data can be relatively
inaccurate. This can be relevant for analysis.
Q6.1. Make a list of different uncertainties/inaccuracies you can imagine there would be in data and
parameters.
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Q6.2. How can uncertainties be accounted for in Zonation? Hint: there are specific techniques in
Zonation, but one can play with inputs as well.
Questions 7. What if the unit of biodiversity is community/ecosystem type?
Quantitative conservation planning often considers species as a unit of biodiversity. However, it is
often practical to use something else, such as community type or habitat type.
Q7.1. What benefits can you think of for using species as units of biodiversity? What kind of
problems could one face with the species-based approach? What benefits and problems do you
think are related to the community-based approach?
Q7.2. How would you set up a Zonation analysis based on community types? Do you need any
special input data? Can you account for species richness in such an analysis?
Questions 8. Balancing representation in protected areas and retention in the full landscape
In conservation planning analyses, it is often assumed that no biodiversity value will remain in the
landscape matrix outside protected areas. In Zonation v3, it is possible to account for likely
retention of biodiversity value outside protected areas.
Q8.1. Can you come up with arguments that justify focusing only on representation in protected
areas conservation prioritization analysis? What about arguments for accounting for retention across
the whole landscape? Why is the balance important?
Q8.2. Imagine you have two species, A and B. Species A is very sensitive to disturbance and is
likely to persist only in a reserve. Species B is not very widespread, but its habitat is likely to
remain all over the landscape even without protection. How would you think Zonation would treat
the two species if only representation was accounted for? How would the situation change if you
would include retention as well?
Questions 9. Dynamic landscapes and climate change
So far, analyses we have discussed have been about static landscapes - you feed in distributions that
are implicitly assumed to be static. However, landscapes may be dynamic due to natural succession
or human activity. Is this a problem?
Climate change is the second major threat for biodiversity, in addition to habitat loss and
fragmentation. One would wish to account for climate change in prioritization, but it is obviously
not very easy to do so.
Q9.1. How could dynamic landscapes be accounted for in Zonation? What kinds of issues are
related to or pronounced when considering dynamic landscapes?
Q9.2. Make a list of relevant considerations when trying to plan for climate change. What can be
accounted for in the context of Zonation?
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Questions 10. Planning for habitat maintenance or restoration.
So far we have been primarily discussing habitat protection. Habitat maintenance or restoration are
other common forms of conservation action. Can these be allocated using Zonation?
Q10.1. If you have one maintenance action or one restoration action, and you would like to know
where you should maintain or restore habitat to get the best possible outcome, how would you set
up an analysis in Zonation?
Q10.2. Restoration does not typically happen instantaneously. How can one account for the time
development of conservation features?
Q10.3. Think about restoration more - it can actually be quite complicated. What complications can
you think of?
Questions 11. What about analysis size?
Have you experienced an “out of memory” condition when trying to load some big data to a
program? Or, has some analysis been so slow that it has functionally failed? The same will happen
with Zonation when data becomes too large.
One Mb, one megabyte is one million, 1000000 bytes. 1Gb is 1000 Mb. Storing one number, like
the occupancy level of a species in a cell, requires 4 bytes. The 32 bit windows environment can use
2GB of RAM memory (or 3GB, with a particular environment switch enabled).
Q11.1. Assume you have a 1000 x 2000 grid cells landscape, of which 75% is “land”. (The rest
25% is missing data such as water or outside of the country.) How many species can you include in
analysis on a typical PC running an 32bit operating system? What is the effect of having both a raw
habitat quality layer and a connectivity layer for each species?
Q11.2. Point distribution data. This data is stored as (location, occurrence) pairs, not as grids. How
much extra memory would be needed for 1000 species with an average of 50 occurrence locations
per species. What is the conclusion here? (Note: penalty is that connectivity does not operate on
point distribution species.)
Note: 64 bit Windows XP, or 64 bit Windows 7 have no restriction to the memory usage of a
program. With these, pretty much all RAM memory can be utilized by the Zv3 64 bit version.
Presently, desktop PCs with ~100 GM of RAM are available for a few thousand EUR/USD.
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Questions 12. Analysis across multiple administrative regions
Q12.1. What kind of planning processes would benefit from an approach that accounts for local as
well as global conservation priority setting?
Q12.2. What problems and uncertainties could there be when trying to account for the preferences
of multiple administrative regions?
Q12.3. Compare strong and weak local weights. What are the differences? When would you prefer
weak local weights? What about strong local weights?
Question 13. Think about analyses that you think Zonation would not best be suited for.
_____________________________________________________________________________
For more information, see e.g., (i) the Zonation manual, (ii) original publications listed in the
Zonation references file, (iii) the Spatial Conservation Prioritization book (Moilanen, Wilson,
Possingham, eds).
Plenty can be done with a good computer and imagination with respect to the analysis setup!
Good luck!
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