Ackbar aims to ease the process of KBA delimitation and update. Its goal is not to provide KBA boundaries that could be submitted directly to the KBA Secretariat, but to highlight areas that should be examined detailed (e.g., check if it is administratively feasible to manage a preservation area on the candidate area or not, or if ecosystems are preserved enough to grant the persistence of the trigger species in the future).

Ackbar was designed to work primarily on geographic distribution data that is stored as a collection of points. Species distributions can be numerically expressed in a variety of formats, the most common are polygons or points, Ackbar only runs on the latter.

There are five major criteria to delimit KBAs. Ackbar only applies criteria A and B on species data; that is, subcriteria A1, B1, and B2. The user should provide at least two different kinds of information per species: UICN categories―including evaluation criteria―and geographic distributions presented as locality data-points. The section Execution parameters of this wiki contains a detail explanation of program parameters, whereas the specification of input data can be retrieved in the Input files page.

Several environmental institutions of Colombia have produced a significant number of red list assessments of a variety of organisms during the last decade. Therefore, it is ideal to integrate all of this new information into the Colombian KBA schema, by either updating the already delimited KBAs (e.g., adding more trigger species or expanding the boundaries) or proposing brand new KBAs. This task, however, can be cumbersome: evaluating each criterion on each species is time-consuming, not to speak about 500 species at once! Thus, there is a need of an analytical tool that could automatize such a process―or part of it―. Ackbar is a simple proposal to reach that goal.

Furthermore, most of the geographic distribution information of Colombian endangered species comes in the form of localities; instead of polygon-like data, such as distribution ranges and species distribution models. This constraints the analytical possibilities to methods that use points instead of polygons.