Further resources: Land management decision making tools for environment and community

Our initial focus has been on rural land management, largely due to the data and models available for nature based solutions. However, the urban and peri-urban space is an exciting one, with plenty of room to explore.

Community engagement and ecosystems services in an urban context are areas we think we can make a big impact, and measuring and monitoring the effects of projects through IOT sensors would be a lot of fun.

Our platform analyses national habitat data and automatically suggests the underlying habitat for any given parcel, however, the user has the ability to adjust the habitat themselves.

We have integrated Natural England Environmental Benefits tool which provides a scoring mechanism to calculate a number of ecosystem services impacts of an intervention. The tool uses many condition inputs such as slope, rainfall, slope etc. to ensure the outputs are based on local conditions, all of which we aim to automate.

We completely appreciate the significance of openness and accessibility when it comes to harnessing natural capital tools to ensure greater decision making, and in turn combating the environment and biodiversity crises. We therefore aim to offer a freemium model of our platform that will allow anyone to access our basic tooling and to view projects collaboratively up to a certain size.

In our capacity as a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, our pricing for full functionality will be subscription based. While we’re still putting the final touch on the specifics, we’re excited to release our pricing model later this year.

Born out of a CivTech challenge and based in Aviemore, our focus for the past 18 months has been on developing a platform that meets the requirements of the Scottish market, yet is future proof and scalable. We made the conscious decision early on to use the latest technology and architecture to help manage our expansion. This enables us to seamlessly integrate new datasets or update carbon calculators within a matter of minutes, ensuring we evolve with the rapidly changing landscape.

We’re excited to launch our platform to the Scottish market in January 2024, followed by our expansion to England and Wales by Summer 2024.

We completely appreciate the significance of openness and accessibility when it comes to harnessing natural capital tools to ensure greater decision making, and in turn combating the environment and biodiversity crises. We therefore aim to offer a freemium model of our platform that will allow anyone to access our basic tooling and to view projects collaboratively up to a certain size.

In our capacity as a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, our pricing for full functionality will be subscription based. While we’re still putting the final touch on the specifics, we’re excited to release our pricing model later this year.

Yes this is very possible. Our platform automates as much as possible through the analysis of underlying datasets such as land use, habitats etc. but the user has the power to update this with their ‘on the ground knowledge’.

We use a full stack of software, but the front end interface is primarily Typescript with React and NodeJS.

We are currently trialling Natural England’s Environmental Benefits tool which uses a number of underlying datasets such as slope, soil, rainfall etc. to assess the ecosystem service impacts based on local factors, to give a more accurate score than a fixed value scoring system.

There will be a free version of our platform available up to a certain size (hectarage).

Naturally anyone involved in land management could be an end user but I appreciate this is not a very helpful answer, but we do believe the more people who can connect through the system the more joint up and better land use decisions can be made.

Initially we believe our platform is very well suited for consultants, land agents / factors and developers in its first release, who run regular projects for multiple sites. However, we see our tooling helping farms, estates, ENGOs, charities etc. as well as local authorities, national parks and Government. We look forward to continuing conversations and building relationships in the rural space to help develop our product.

Thank you for your feedback on this. The ONS Projections are useful at a national scale, but there is limited projection data available at the local level we are using to analyse areas such as post codes, data zones or ward boundaries. We look forward to Scotland’s 2022 Census data being released.

Absolutely. Additionality, stacking and bundling are all crucial factors when planning a project and we have built in checks to manage this.

For example, we have integrated the Woodland Carbon Code’s Additionality (Cash Flow) spreadsheet and like everything in our platform, we aim to automate as much of this as possible with data we can identify such as grants, WCC data, project length, validation/verifications estimates etc. but there will of course need some user input to make this as accurate as possible.

As nature based models continue to develop, we keep a close eye on what options can be stacked/bundled and our platform will flag any issues or opportunities.

Yes, the data shown in the natural capital section is exportable into a PDF report format along with sources of data to ensure trust in the platform and the data we use. It is also possible to export data from Woodland Carbon Code scenarios out to the standard WCC excel spreadsheet template for example. Our platform is also collaborative, so it is possible to share a project with a colleague or stakeholder for example.