Globally, billions of dollars are spent on the aquisition of nature reserves to protect biodiversity.  Deciding how these investments are made is a challenging task and requires new approaches to enable managers and policy makers to make defensible decisions that lead to more cost-effective and reliable environmental outcomes. 

As custodians of Marxan, AEDA and the Possingham lab at the University of Queensland actively pursue a program of research and development to advance the Marxan family of systematic conservation planning software and further develop the theory of conservation planning.