What is Marxan?
“Marxan is the most widely used decision support software for conservation planning globally. It’s used in 184 countries to build marine and terrestrial conservation systems and is the global leader in conservation land and sea use planning software”.
Essentially, Marxan uses species distributions, planning unit costs, and countless variables (depending on your analysis objective) to identify potential areas for conservation efforts.
Mammalian Conservation & Species
This analysis seeks to identify areas that are cost-effective for mammalian conservation in the state of Utah. The species under investigation are the following:
- Wolverine
- Ringtailed Cat
- Red Fox
- Lynx
- Kit Fox
- Cougar
UTAH (needs work)
Utah is 13th largest US state with a total area of 84,899 sq. miles with ~97% being terrestrial.
Planning Units
## OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile
## Source: "C:\Users\Josh Carrell\Documents\R\WATS6340\PU_UTAH.shp", layer: "PU_UTAH"
## with 8975 features
## It has 10 fields
## Integer64 fields read as strings: PageNumber COUNT