User Guide: Applying Marxan with Zones: North central coast of California marine study

Abstract

We describe the operation of the 'Marxan with Zones' software (Watts et al. 2008 in prep, Klein et al. 2008) on a Marine planning problem for the north central coast of California, USA (Klein et al. 2008 in prep). 'Marxan with Zones' is an adaptation of the 'Marxan'software (Ball & Possingham 2000, Possingham et al. 2000). Operating the software involved a series of steps, including; framing the problem definition, calibrating the input parameters, validating the correct operation of the software, and generating robust results. These steps were performed for each of our planning scenarios, illustrating best practices for 'Marxan with Zones'. The software used for running 'Marxan with Zones' and performing calibration, validation, results analysis and explorative data analysis was 'Zonae Cogito' (Watts et al. 2008 in prep).