In 2018, the vision of “Democratizing Marxan” began. Through the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management programme (BIOPAMA), funded by the European Union, the Joint Research Centre worked closely with The Nature Conservancy to prototype a web-based Marxan platform that improves accessibility to non-experts and supports our common vision of providing accessible tools for evidence-based conservation planning. This led to a partnership with Microsoft in 2020, which aims to scale Marxan’s infrastructure for global accessibility and empowering users with the tools and data they need to make smarter decisions for the planet. In late 2020 and early 2021 Microsoft's Azure Quantum team made several open source contributions to Marxan resulting in increased performance when running on multi-core machines and cloud environments. The resulting version 4 of Marxan is now available from marxansolutions.org.
