Marxan.

Democratizing 
spatial conservation planning.

The Marxan Planning Platform (MaPP) is the world’s leading spatial conservation planning service, designed to include anyone, anywhere, to make evidence-based conservation planning decisions.

Users can upload relevant data to their goals, define planning areas and units, set conservation targets and costs, identify conservation gaps, and collaboratively examine solutions and trade-offs in the cloud!

Empowering collaborative spatial planning projects for land, freshwater, and ocean conservation.

Safeguarding biodiversity and community needs

With the help of the Marxan Planning Platform, on-the-ground partners, scientists, and NGOs are supporting the government of Angola in the early stages of reconciling the Upper Okavango River Basin’s rich biodiversity and community development. 

Collaboration action.

Marxan aids stakeholders in aligning conservation priorities with other goals for win-win solutions.

Actionable design.

An intuitive interface requiring little technical expertise alleviates geospatial analysis’s steep learning curve.

Cloud-based efficiency.

Cloud-based conservation planning tool, Marxan creates and compares real-time conservation scenarios.

Developing the Marxan Planning Platform.

The brief.

A global network of over 250,000 protected areas spans over 23% of the planet. In response to the challenge of selecting areas to safeguard, Marxan has risen over the past two decades as an open-source spatial planning software used in 180+ countries to harmonize conservation, societal needs, and political constraints, heralding a forthcoming democratisation of evidence-backed conservation planning.

Our role.

In 2020, we became the primary developers operationalizing the vision of Democratizing Marxan, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Microsoft, the European Commission, and the Marxan Community of Practice that brought Marxan to the cloud. We created interactive, data-driven maps within the larger Marxan Planning Platform architecture and revamped its design to be more intuitive and balance usability and complexity.

Designers, spatial planning experts, and developers collaborated to build workflows targeting decision-makers intent on examining complex trade-offs, collaborative planning, and employing computer-based decision-support systems to benefit nature, climate, and people.

Delivered with impact.

Designing a new conservation planning precedent.

Thanks to creating a new intuitive design, we are enabling stakeholders of many diverse backgrounds to take advantage of MaPP’s comprehensive conservation planning functionalities.

We're on the brink of enabling evidence-based planning globally, making data-driven decisions accessible and bypassing common geospatial analysis obstacles.

We developed MaPP, a cloud-based platform with a central dashboard, enabling efficient real-time collaboration on conservation scenarios.
This approach maximizes storage, transparency, and learning for Marxan users worldwide.

A new decade for Marxan.

  • Cloud-based
  • Intuitive design
  • Collaborative potential

Half-Earth.

Centering nature.

Want to make a difference together?

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