From 18-21 February 2016, six members of the Conservation Planning Group organized a writing workshop on Magnetic Island. The main aim of the workshop was to produce a journal paper describing the first stage of a global database on planning studies. The explosive growth of systematic conservation planning in the last decade has made it increasingly difficult for scientists and practitioners to keep track of studies. Resulting problems include duplication of work, failure to take advantage of previous exercises, and difficulties in understanding best-practice. The prototype database, now complete, covers all peer-reviewed papers (160) in marine conservation planning and, where available, their supporting project reports. The database contains about 55 fields, covering key aspects of each study, and will allow users to browse and search studies, map their locations, identify relationships between studies and fields within studies, and extract statistics and trends. The medium-term strategy is to extend the prototype to a fully comprehensive, progressively updated, open-access database on all studies in systematic conservation planning, including reports outside the peer-reviewed literature.
Published by Jorge G. Álvarez-Romero
Jorge is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist with a Ph.D. in Systematic Conservation Planning from James Cook University in Australia. With over 15 years of experience in this field, he has led various transdisciplinary projects in terrestrial and marine environments. His work covers multiple topics, such as integrating land-based threats into marine planning, identifying co-benefits from multiple objectives (e.g., downstream benefits in aquatic ecosystems from conservation actions in river basins), enhancing ecological connectivity on conservation networks, and improving collaboration across interests and jurisdictional boundaries. Jorge uses various tools and techniques, including GIS, spatial optimization, spatial modeling, scenario planning, and expert elicitation. Ultimately, he is particularly interested in promoting the integration of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine spatial planning to develop holistic solutions that address complex conservation challenges. View all posts by Jorge G. Álvarez-Romero
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