 It was a product of Ian R. Ball's PhD thesis, while he was a student at the University of Adelaide in 2000, and was supervised and funded by Hugh Possingham, who currently holds a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland.It was an extension of the existing SPEXAN program.MARXAN is the most widely used systematic reserve planning software in the world, and has been used to create the marine reserve network on the Great Barrier Reef, in Queensland, Australia, the largest marine protected area in the world.