Skip to content

Note: Starting from June 11, 2025, using the MyCSC portal will require multi-factor authentication (MFA). Read our MFA guide here.

Zonation

Zonation is a spatial conservation prioritization framework for large-scale conservation planning. It identifies areas, or landscapes, important for retaining high habitat quality and connectivity for multiple biodiversity features (eg. species), providing a quantitative method for enhancing species' long term persistence.

Available

Zonation including Graphical User Interface is available in Puhti with following versions:

  • 5.2.3
  • 5.2.1
  • 5.2.0.2
  • 5.1.0

Usage

Zonation is available in the zonation module:

module load zonation
z5 <command arguments>

With version 5.2.1 you can also use zonation5 <command arguments>

Zonation can be used in Puhti with command-line or graphical interface, as interactive job or with batch system. In any case reserve suitable amount of computing resources: cores and memory. Zonation 5 runs faster, if it can use several cores. In Puhti, it can use one node, which is max 40 cores.

Before starting Zonation, move your data to your project's scratch folder. For testing, zonation5-tutorial data can be used.

Zonation with Graphical User Interface

Zonation Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be started in Puhti web interface:

  1. Log in to Puhti web interface.
  2. Open Desktop app
  3. After launching the Desktop, double-click Zonation icon.

Working with Zonation interactively

For relatively short analysis jobs, it is possible to use Zonation in interactive session.

sinteractive -i
cd /scratch/project_200xxxx/<location_of_your_data>
z5 -w --mode=ABF minimal_settings.z5 /scratch/project_200xxxx/example1_out

Using Zonation with batch job

For longer analysis jobs, Puhti batch system should be used.

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --account=project_200xxxx
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=40
#SBATCH --partition=small
#SBATCH --time=00:15:00
#SBATCH --mem=4G

module load zonation
cd /scratch/project_200xxxx/<location_of_your_data>
srun z5 -w --mode=ABF minimal_settings.z5 /scratch/project_200xxxx/example1_out

License

Zonation 5 is distributed as is, freely under GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 (#GNUGPL) (#GNUGPLv3) license.

Citation

Moilanen, A., Lehtinen, P., Kohonen, I., Virtanen, E., Jalkanen, J. and Kujala, H. 2022. Novel methods for spatial prioritization with applications in conservation, land use planning and ecological impact avoidance. Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Acknowledgement

Please acknowledge CSC and Geoportti in your publications, it is important for project continuation and funding reports. As an example, you can write "The authors wish to thank CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland (urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072531) and the Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (Geoportti, urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072513) for computational resources and support".

Installation

Zonation was installed to Puhti with Apptainer using Zonation Apptainer definition files written by Pauli Lehtinen from University of Helsinki with slight modifications.

The container was finally wrapped with Tykky's wrap-container functionality: wrap-container -w /squashfs-root/AppRun --prefix install_dir zonation5_v2.1.sif

Symbolic links added for z5 and zonation5 to work as starting commands.

References