 Computationally, MARXAN provides solutions to a conservation version of the 0-1 knapsack problem, where the objects of interest are potential reserve sites with given biological attributes.The simulated annealing algorithm attempts to minimise the total cost of the reserve system, while achieving a set of conservation goals (typically that a certain percentage of each geographical/biological feature is represented by the reserve system).MARXAN is a portmanteau acronym, fusing MARine, and SPEXAN, itself an acronym for SPatially EXplicit ANnealing.