About this Course

As the world prepares to meet ambitious goals for global biodiversity, we need to scale our investments in systematic conservation planning. The use of free and open decision-support tools, such as Marxan, is critical to building scenarios, understanding trade-offs and ensuring transparent and robust decision-making for our planet, communities, and economies.

Together, the Marxan Leadership Team, with support from experts around the world, have created a world-class training program which is being offered for the first time online, and at deeply discounted rates.

In this 5 hour short course you will get the foundational theory of systematic conservation planning, hands on-learning, technical know-how, and take-home activities to help you get started. Small class sizes means we will have time to discuss and answer questions about your conservation planning challenges.

About your Instructor

Dr. Jennifer McGowan is the Global Managing Director of Marxan. She is committed to teaching conservation planning theory and skills to build capacity in governments, the private sector, and NGOs to embrace systematic conservation planning in biodiversity, climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and sustainable development for land, freshwater, and ocean systems.

Jennifer uses aspects of mapping, spatial ecology, economics, operations research, policy and decision theory to make transparent, repeatable and robust decisions about the allocation of resources to inform conservation actions on the ground. She applies these skills at global and local scales to help solve a wide array of challenges, from optimizing protected area network design to prioritizing countries for conservation finance initiatives to deliver large return-on-investment benefits from biodiversity protection.

She holds affiliate research positions at Yale's Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and The University of Queensland's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. You can find out more about Jennifer's research here.

Classes will be run online in English as plenary lectures, activities and discussions and we are offering two different times to ensure we can have participants from around the world.

If you are a student or early career researcher from Latin America, Caribbean, Asia-Pacific or Africa and you do not have funding to take this course - we are able to offer 5 scholarships per class thanks to the generous donation of Marxan's founder Prof. Hugh Possingham and the University of Queensland's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. Please enquire for these scholarships by writing to [email protected] with the subject line"MARXAN SCHOLAR".

We look forward to helping you help the planet.

Dates

• Friday September 15 (2-7am BST)
• Friday October 6 (2-7am BST)
• Friday October 20 (3-8pm BST)