There is a need for regional or national plans to provide the framework for natural resource management, and the additional need of local knowledge for implementation, since not all high-service provision is aligned with environmental gain. This need is clearest in planning natural flood management schemes, where opportunity mapping doesn't indicate where to solve problems.
The Viridian Logic platform goes beyond opportunity mapping, calculating hydraulic flow over land topology and rating the ability of locations across the landscape in mitigating water quantity and quality problems before rainfall reaches the river network. The system models catchments to produce maps that show (1) how hard each part of the landscape is working to provide the specific benefits needed locally, then (2) identifies which habitats to create and where to create them to produce the greatest improvements in service provision at least cost. This is at a 5m scale and has been applied up to 720 square kilometres in the UK. Identifying the areas of least ability, and then proposing various habitat planting schemes, the maps that are delivered describe the optimal land use change in the right upland (and sometimes lowland) areas to reduce flooding that affects communities downstream.
The talk will expand upon the motivations for building the tool, how it works, some of the areas it has already been applied to, and a sneak peek at some of the exciting platform developments on the horizon.