Absolutely not! One of the motivations behind the creation of PIE was to take a process of spatial optimization in decision-making and make it available for decision-makers that have no background or experience in GIS or mapping. 

During the prototype testing period we will not have the functionality to upload your own data. However, this is scheduled for development within PIE. Ideally, if users have areas that they know are important then they can upload GIS files or draw on a map the areas they are interested in. Of course, uploading spatial information requires more GIS expertise than is required for the rest of PIE, but we do hope to have this functionality in the future. 

Building an optimization requires all these types of data so that the optimization tool has enough information to undertake a series of calculations that are meaningful in answering the optimization question. A key feature of PIE results is that they give you a decent idea of the best places to have the most impact and limit tradeoffs in objectives. This is why knowing the areas you're interested in is important, knowing the potential of those places for delivering impact is important, knowing where within your regions it is possible to take action is important, and finally, making sure that you include other environmental or social objectives helps bring more meaning to the results. This is what makes PIE unique, you have the capacity not only to see where you can have the highest potential impact, but you can be more sure that the benefits from the work will be in places of specific environmental or social priority. 

In 2015 The Natural Capital Project and International Union for Conservation of Nature teamed up to develop a way to demonstrate the tradeoffs among ecosystem service objectives in country commitments to Forest Landscape Restoration under the Bonn Challenge. This work, supported by DFID, led to the development of the open-source geospatial analysis program The Restoration Opportunities Optimization Tool (ROOT). Hosted by Stanford University ROOT continues to be used by GIS specialists and scientists to optimize spatial decisions in contexts that range from watersheds to national-scale analyses. PIE utilizes these abilities in a less research-oriented way, focusing on its application for decision-makers in common contexts and for those without geospatial expertise. You can read more about its scientific background in the Data & Methods page