Marxan Workshop Report

It was always part of the plan for the BCMCA to host a Marxan expert workshop to gather advice from those who have experience with the tool. It was a natural fit for the BCMCA and PacMARA to jointly host the Marxan workshop, as the BCMCA will be publishing lessons learned as a case study for a future edition of the Marxan Good Practices Handbook. Thus, the workshop was jointly planned with common objectives in mind and it was a great success!

A report of the workshop recommendations has been compiled and has now been posted on the BCMCA and PacMARA Websites. The report can be downloaded: Marxan Workshop Workshop Proceedings Report, June 2010 (0.5 MB PDF). The workshop report highlights the discussions and recommendations made by participants that advise both the BCMCA Marxan Analysis and improvements that can be made to the Marxan Good Practices Handbook.

The workshop was held May 26-27, 2009 at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. A total of 29 experts and observers attended from places including Australia, Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Washington DC, and British Columbia. Invited participants included government staff, university researchers, graduate students, NGO staff, Marxan consultants, professional economists and climate change scientists. Five BCMCA Project Team members attended the workshop.

The primary objectives of the workshop were to:

The workshop attendees broke into three sub-groups (robust analysis, human use, climate change) to facilitate active participation and discussion. These smaller groups periodically reported to the larger group in lively plenary sessions.

Subsequent to the workshop, PacMARA hosted an “Introduction to Marxan” course which was delivered by the Australian workshop guests (Eddie Game, co-author of the revised Marxan Manual, and Dan Segan of the University of Queensland). Sixteen attendees included students from Parks Canada, DFO, Environment Canada, First Nations and academia, and four of these were members of the BCMCA Project Team.