Projects

Develop scenarios that integrate the social, economic, and environmental impacts of changes in land management and/or use of drained peatlands that can be used by communities, rural professionals, and government to inform land-use decision making and future research activity.

Optimisation-based land-use scenario modelling for achieving water quality targets in different New Zealand catchments while not compromising profitability, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, or resulting in other environmental impacts (Matheson et al. 2024).

We will use a multi-objective optimisation modelling framework to generate optimal landscape templates for spatial prioritisation of clusters of trees in relation to soil properties and plant traits under current and future climate conditions. Outputs from the model will be combined with probabilistic modelling of landowner economic and cultural decisions about tree establishment to deliver probabilistic models of adoption to achieve optimal landscape solutions across multiple co-benefits.

Implementation of a LUMASS interface for non-linear programming solvers utilising the .nl file format (Gay 2005).
Implementation of the National Water, Environment and Economic Land-Use Model in LUMASS (Harris et al. 2024).

Estimation of the effect of contaminant reduction targets for New Zealand estuaries on the health of estuaris.
Assessment of the implications of contaminant reduction targets for estuaries for catchment land-use management. (Herzig et al. 2024)

Constrained land-use optimisation scenarios to identify suitable locations for replacing pastoral agriculture in catchments under nitrogen and phosphorous pressure with horticulture and forest to achieve greenhouse gas emission targets and water quality objectives (McDowell et al. 2023)

Extension of the LUMASS modelling framework to a low-code interoperable model coupling framework (Herzig et al. 2020)
Implementation of the sediment generation component of the Temporal Erosion and Sediment Transport (TEST) model in LUMASS (Presentation | Video)
Coupling of the sediment generation component with the sediment transport (in rivers) component (NIWA) using LUMASS’ interoperable model coupling framework

Implementation of an automatic update procedure for the new land-use map utilising LUMASS’ spatial modelling framework
This includes the automatic generation of a detailed data provenance record of each processing step and its parameters to produce the land-use map

Application of the core SedNetNZ model implemented in the LUMASS modelling framework. including downstream sediment routing and sediment trapping in lakes

Development of an interoperability wrapper around the LUMASS engine. This exposes any spatial process or optimisation model developed within the framework through the Basic Model Interface (BMI) and enables it integration into any BMI-compliant composite model (Elliot et al. 2020)
Extension of the spatial optimisation component to enable incentivised optimisation, e.g. accounting for payments for environmental contaminant reductions (Herzig et al. 2020b)

LUMASS-based prototype streaming server for ingesting live model data into mobile virtual realitay applications (WebVR) (Herzig 2019, Herzig & Scholten 2019 (Presentation | Video))

Optimisation-based land-use scenario modelling to explore the effect of replacing pastoral agriculture with high value crops on greenhouse gas emissions and profitability while considering land-use suitability for crops (Report | Paper)

Implementation of fine-grained data (model) provenance tracking into the LUMASS modelling framework. This extension provides automatic PROV-N encoded data provenance tracking for any LUMASS model each time it is executed within the LUMASS framework. (Spiekermann et al. 2019, Herzig et al. 2019)