ABPmer develops too for marine planners

The Marxan Tool can be FREELY downloaded from www.abpmer.co.uk/allnews4066.asp

The UK Marine & Coastal Access Act and Marine (Scotland) Act provide for the identification, designation and management of a network of MCZs (and equivalent Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in Scottish territorial waters) to protect nationally rare/threatened and representative habitats and species and features of geological and geomorphological importance.

Marxan is a commonly used tool to inform conservation network planning. However, until now the inputting of common boundary lengths of neighbouring planning cells to Marxan has been a manual and laborious process. To support its application of Marxan to various marine conservation planning studies, ABPmer has developed a customised GIS geo-processing tool and is pleased to make this freely available to the wider Marxan community.

Stephen Hull, ABPmer’s technical director said, ‘We are delighted to provide Marxan users with a much needed tool that will allow ArcGIS 10 users to load existing conservation network boundary data and automatically extract all shared boundary lengths into a Marxan ready text format. This .NET application is developed using the latest ArcGIS 10 add-in model which means that it can easily shared between users as they do not require installation programs.