Welcome to the ConsNet 1.0 portal from the Biodiversity and Biocultural Conservation Laboratory (BBCL) at the University of Texas at Austin developed by Sahotra Sarkar, Alexander Moffett, and Trevon Fuller. This is a state-of-art portal devoted to systematic conservation planning (Margules and Pressey 2000; Sarkar 2005). This portal includes decision support systems including software planning tools with documentation and tutorials, case studies, data sets, and links to databases. All the software mentioned in the portal can be downloaded over the web, most of them at no cost to you. Some of the software can also be run on our computers. This makes sense if you don’t have local access to high-speed machines.

The tutorial on this portal goes through the eleven stages of systematic conservation planning. Eventually, we will provide and support tools for all stages; at present our tools are oriented towards the design of conservation area networks (see below) but not towards their management. The projects provide examples of the planning process using the planning tools supported in this portal. You may want to sample a few of these projects to see what can and cannot be done.

In general, you’ll need a GIS package to represent the region for which a conservation plan is being devised. Central to systematic conservation planning is the design of conservation area networks. This process begins with setting conservation goals and selecting surrogates for biodiversity (Sarkar et al. 2005). The basic data consists of the sites in the landscape, typically represented as cells within a GIS model, and features of these cells, especially the biodiversity surrogates that are present in them. The most commonly used surrogates are species. Niche models allow the prediction of the distribution of species using environmental data such as climate layers and records of their presence (obtained, for instance, from museum collections). We have included some links to databases but, typically, you’ll want to collect and use your own data. Site selection can be carried out using a wide variety of algorithms incorporated into the software packages available here. Conservation planning today incorporates many socio-political and other constraints on the designation of land; tools for multi-criteria analysis can be used for this purpose.

At present, the following two programs can be run on our server using a browser: ResNet 1.2. and MultCSync 1.0. However, to run either of these programs you will need a username and password. If you don’t have one, please send us e-mail. This may take a day or two. If you encounter problems, contact Sahotra Sarkar, Alexander Moffett, or Trevon Fuller. Meanwhile, you can download the relevant manuals from this site and read them. You can also download both of these and many other software packages from the BBCL web-site to your own computer and run them there.

We welcome and will acknowledge suggestions from all users.

References

Margules, C. R. and Pressey, R. L. 2000. “Systematic Conservation Planning.” Nature 405: 242 -253.

Sarkar, S. 2005. Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sarkar, S., Justus, J., Fuller, T., Kelley, C., Garson, J., and Mayfield, M. 2005. “Effectiveness of Environmental Surrogates for the Selection of Conservation Area Networks.” Conservation Biology 19: 815 -825.

Return to ConsNet Homepage