Nature Braid

What is Nature Braid?

Nature Braid is an environmental and spatial framework that illustrates the impacts of land use, management, climate, etc on the environment and associated ecosystem services. It runs at fine spatial scales to understand the flows of energy, water, mass, and contaminants through the landscape and to water bodies. It compares the current capabilities of the landscape estimates of their potential capabilities.

Nature Braid uses this information to identify areas where changes to land use might be beneficial to help the landscape meet its potential capabilities, or where maintenance of the status quo might be desirable to prevent degradation. NB is relevant for a range of users at multiple scales and levels of decision-making. It can be applied for applications around sustainable development, conservation, sustainable tourism, restoration, and policy-making.

The NB framework includes models for:

• Agricultural production
• Erosion risk and sediment delivery
• Estimating soil hydraulic characteristics
• Carbon sequestration
• Flood mitigation
• Habitat provision (connectivity, mean patch size, Shannon’s and Simpson’s diversity, species distribution and density)
• Land use/cover accounting
• Rainfall-runoff
• Water quality (nitrogen and phosphorus)

Who's it for?

Policy makers

Due to NB’s capability to operate at different spatial scales, different levels of government and decision-making groups from local to national can use NB to better understand their environment. We can help them understand the current and potential capabilities of their landscape at the baseline, allowing for comparison to other scenarios, and to study the potential outcomes of policy and legislation. It can be used for planning around sustainable development (e.g. tourism, regulation, etc.).

Although NB has been applied to many rural areas, the framework has also been used to understand:

• Effects of blue-green infrastructure and nature-based solutions at the city scale
• Changes in urban green spaces over time at the city scale
• Impacts of land use changes at the regional/country scale

Farmers and land managers

Farmers can use NB to help meet freshwater policy requirements and identify where they can make changes to their land management with minimal impact to their bottom line. For example, dairy farmers can use NB to better understand how to intercept and retain nutrients before they reach waterways and impact water quality. Foresters working with transport planners can use NB’s erosion and sediment delivery tool to identify areas to target interventions to reduce erosion-induced damage to transport infrastructure. See "LUCI calms the farm".

Students

NB has been used in a range of student projects from looking at improving land management practices in farms and catchments across New Zealand to urban applications in Wellington and Christchurch to understanding effects of land use changes to areas in Vietnam and the Philippines. A school class may also use NB to explore, for example, the distribution and density of different threatened species in a particular area of interest and how land use changes can improve habitat connectivity and diversity.

Iwi and hapū

Iwi and hapū can use NB for sustainable management of their rohe, explore scenarios based on changes to land use, management, and climate, and identify win-win scenarios where there are resource conflicts. The team is also working on bringing in a cultural mapping tool to NB to better understand how to protect culturally important sites.

Communities and stakeholder groups

Local communities can use LUCI to gain a greater understanding of wider environmental impacts which could result in improved water quality, less erosion and sedimentation, lower flood risk etc. Stakeholder engagement is important for more participatory planning, allowing communities to feel a greater ownership and responsibility over their environment and for the team to better understand the community’s needs and priorities.

The team works together with communities to identify where existing input datasets can be further enhanced with local knowledge to produce results that better reflect actual local conditions, which are often missed in large-scale regional or national datasets. We also work together to identify potential scenarios as this feedback is key to understanding realistic scenarios of land use changes.

Local councils

NB can be used to support the development of Regional Policy Statements to ensure that councils are able to make more informed and effective decisions in relation to land management and strategic planning. The team has worked with stakeholders and members of local and regional councils to help support sustainable management of their local landscapes, and identify where land use changes can provide multiple benefits.

Academics

NB has been used in a variety of academic research to explore topics of landscape management, monitoring ecosystem services, engaging stakeholders, wetland restoration, water quality, flood risk, and data quality.

How is Nature Braid different?

NB is a spatially explicit decision support tool. It is simple and transparent, and produces results that are highly visual and accessible, allowing for easier engagement with stakeholders at the planning table. Its innovative algorithms maintain biophysical principles and spatial connections and are orders of magnitude faster than previous approaches.

While it shares features in common with other similar tools, NB’s ability to simultaneously model different spatial scales such as field to catchment to regions to national-scale are unique. The landscape’s spatial configuration is important, as flows and connections are fundamental in NB’s model framework. Going beyond just identifying what occurs in one pixel, it considers what flows into that pixel, what flows out, and where it goes. For example, the results from NB can tell users what features of the landscape are able to mitigate or “catch” these flows before they reach the stream, and where the flow is coming from in terms of what is uphill.

NB’s unique, built-in trade-off tool allows the user to compare multiple ecosystem services at once. Its output identifies locations in the landscape where trade-offs or co-benefits/synergies in ecosystem services exist. Trade-offs are areas where one service would benefit from management interventions but lead to the degradation of a different service being provided by the same area. Co-benefits and synergies are areas where multiple services might benefit from certain interventions.