Our Data Prioritisation methodology

An important part of our Berkshire Local Nature Recovery Strategy is the method of choosing which areas of Berkshire to prioritise for nature recovery. We cannot select everywhere: we have to decide where is most important to focus effort on first. Here in Berkshire, we decided to input priorities from all of our stakeholders (from our workshops and survey) and from documents existing on nature recovery from various councils, public bodies and NGOs, into a piece of software called Marxan. This undergoes a process called Systematic Conservation Planning.

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Marxan is a Decision Support software tool for conservation planning. It has been designed to select areas that meet specific targets with the lowest possible cost. It allows us to optimising our spatial prioritization whilst considering many disparate goals and targets at the same time. It has been used widely around the world.

Find out more here: http://marxan.org/about.html

More on SCP

Systematic conservation planning is an operational model for identifying and implementing the management of priority areas for conservation and restoration.

It is an efficient, repeatable, transparent and equitable process for informing conservation decisions.

It provides an evidence-based approach, based on defining stakeholder priorities and translating that into maps to inform action on the ground.

Find out more here: Systematic Conservation Planning - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics