The Marxan Planning Platform
Democratizing spatial conservation planning.

Democratizing spatial conservation planning.

Overview

Democratizing spatial conservation planning, at global scale

Marxan is the world’s leading open-source conservation planning tool, now brought to the cloud through the Marxan Planning Platform (MaPP). Built to support a global community, the platform enables teams to upload data, define planning units, set targets and costs, and collaboratively explore scenarios and trade-offs across land, freshwater, and ocean systems, all within a shared workspace.

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My role - Product & Interaction Design

Designing the foundation for a platform built for an entire community

Core Contributions:

  • Visual identity & branding system: Helped define the look and feel of the platform, ensuring it felt credible, modern, and consistent across the product experience.
  • Information architecture & content structure: Shaped the platform’s architecture to support multiple project types and permissions, making it scalable for public, private-community, and fully private workspaces.
  • UI foundations & interface design: Designed key screens, core layouts, and reusable patterns to balance usability with the complexity of advanced conservation workflows.
  • Cross-team collaboration & alignment: Worked closely with Microsoft and TNC stakeholders (product, engineering, brand) to translate complex scientific planning needs into a coherent platform experience.
Results

A platform that scales with both ambition and community feedback

6,000+ users, 100 countries
Supporting a truly global community-led ecosystem, where users actively help evolve the tools through training, feedback, and shared practice.
180+ countries reached through Marxan’s open-source footprint
The platform builds on a tool that’s been adopted worldwide for decades, helping accelerate evidence-based planning across diverse contexts.
Hundreds of conservation planning problems powered worldwide
Marxan has been applied across countless planning challenges, and MaPP pushes this capability further with cloud collaboration and shared learning.
The world’s first cloud-hosted, free, open-source spatial planning platform
Launched through a partnership between TNC and Microsoft, making advanced conservation planning more accessible, collaborative, and scalable.
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