Locking planning units in or out.

Manually including or excluding individual planning units is useful where a real-world issue affects where new protected areas or conservation actions can be designated. For example, if you know that a particular group of planning units contains a restricted military or an urban area and cannot be designated, then you could manually exclude them from the project.

In the example below, we know that the city is not available for conservation action. Therefore, it has been locked out of the Marxan solution meaning these planning units cannot be selected as priority areas.

Similarly, if you know a particular planning unit must be included in the solution as a priority area you can lock it in. In this example, we know the Bird of Paradise and the Anoa only occurs in one planning unit and therefore we choose to lock it into the solution.