Overview
LUCI explores the capability of a landscape to provide a variety of ecosystem services, such as agricultural production, erosion control, carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, habitat provision etc. It compares the services provided by the current utilisation of the landscape to estimates of its potential capability, and uses this information to identify areas where change might be beneficial, and where maintenance of the status quo might be desirable.
The following services are currently modelled by LUCI:
| Service | Method |
Production |
Based on slope, fertility, drainage, aspect |
Carbon |
IPCC Tier 1 – based on soil & vegetation |
Flooding |
Detailed topographical routing of water accounting for storage and infiltration capacity as function of soil and land use. |
Erosion |
Slope, curvature, contributing area, land use, soil type |
Sediment delivery |
Erosion combined with detailed topographical routing |
Water quality |
Export coefficients combined with water flow and sediment delivery models |
Habitat (Approach A) |
BEETLE – Forest Research’s cost-distance approach to dispersal, examines connectivity |
Habitat (Approach B) |
Identification of priority habitat by biophysical requirements e.g. wet grassland |
Tradeoffs/synergy identification |
Various layering options with categorised service maps; e.g. Boolean, conservative, weighted arithmetic |
Background
LUCI is a second generation extension and accompanying software implementation of the Polyscape framework as described in:
Jackson, B, Pagella, T, Sinclair, F, Orellana, B, Henshaw, A, McIntyre, N, Reynolds, B, Wheater, H, Eycott, A (2013) Polyscape: a GIS mapping toolbox providing efficient and spatially explicit landscape-scale valuation of multiple ecosystem services, Urban and Landscape Planning 112, 74-88.
The LUCI framework is designed to follow the following principles:
| Practical | Conceptual |
Can be run using nationally available data; i.e. available everywhere so relevant to national spatial planning |
Operates at a spatial scale relevant for field and sub-field level management decisions |
Modular – can embed other models & aspects can be embedded in other models (LUCI is a framework) |
“Values” features and potential interventions by area affected, not just area directly modified |
Fast running to enable “real time” scenario exploration |
Addresses tradeoffs & searches for “win-win” solutions |
Availability and requirements for application
LUCI is an evolving tool; but a release version including the original Polyscape functionality will be made available in the near future, with details on how to obtain it available on this website. It requires ESRI’s ArcGIS 10.1 or above to run. Documentation and help are embedded within the LUCI software.
Minimum data requirements for successful application are:
A number of national datasets are supported for UK and NZ applications; for other countries it is currently necessary to match land cover and soil information into the supported classification systems. Support for a broader range of datasets will be added in the future.
For further information, contact: info@lucitools.org