ABSTRACT
Biosphere Reserves (BR) were introduced into the conservation arena in the late sixties almost concomitantly with the launch of the United Nations' Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB-UNESCO). This chapter explores the spatial compatibility between management regimes in some detail, while assigning planning units to specific zones of the Pantanal Biosphere Reserve (PBR). The Pantanal, the biggest of those wetlands, is located in the northern reaches of the Upper Paraguay River Basin (UPRB) with 70 per cent in Brazil and 30 per cent shared between Bolivia and Paraguay. The chapter describes the planning framework, the problem formulation and information layers used in systematic zoning, as well as the data treatments necessary to parameterize Marxan with Zones. It considers that watershed-based management forges an overlap between several administrative and management structures, including the municipality, catchment authority, national and state parks, the RAMSAR areas and world heritage sites.
