LAMPT is a decision support tool for landscape/land-use management and planning to minimize land and water degradation.

Land and water degradation are widespread phenomena in many developing regions, and soil and nutrient loss from fields undermine crop productivity.
Accelerated erosion also results in the rapid sedimentation of water resources and the loss of envisaged benefits (Tamene and Vlek, 2007).

Since resources are scarce and all areas do not experience equal magnitude of problems, site-specific and problem oriented management measures are essential to tackle land and water degradation.
Identification of the critical areas that experience high soil/nutrient loss is essential, as they are responsible for the majority of sediment in downstream water resources.

Operational tools to minimize land and water degradation in developing regions through landscape planning are yet rarely available. Some of the existing tools are very data demanding and/or too complicated to be useful to data scarce regions.
One main objective of our research team is therefore to develop a simple but robust land management and planning tool that can easily be applied in data scarce regions.
Currently, a prototype LAMPT is developed that can be used to estimate the spatial patterns and rates of soil and nutrient loss in selected catchments of Ghana and Burkina Faso.

The Objectives for LAMPT are to

Quantify the rates of soil loss and identify critical areas of sediment and non-point source pollution

Develop a simple but robust landscape management tool that can help decision makers prioritize areas and types of management options

Perform cost-benefit analysis of different management options for positions in the landscape

LAMPT integrates important factors of soil erosion and deposition, and provides users with option to choose various physical parameters that are relevant to the conditions in West Africa.
LAMPT also allows users to choose different sets of land-use management and planning options designed to minimize soil and nutrient loss, and reservoir sedimentation or pollution. Through a selection of management and planning options, graphical outputs (maps and graphs) can be produced fast. The tool can also be coupled with LUDAS (Le et al., 2008), an agent-based land-use change model using the same platform, to comprehensively simulate environment–community feedbacks.

LAMPT will be expanded further to offer choices among different models, such that users can select models appropriate to their tasks and data availability, and to incorporate a module for cost-benefit analysis of management options. LAMPT is developed in NetLogo, an agent based programming platform.

The example screenshot shows the configurations and parameter setting options of LAMPT designed to identify sediment and non-point source pollution zones for a catchment in northern Ghana. In this example, a simple sediment transport index based on the RUSLE (Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation) is used to identify patterns and analyze the effects of different management scenarios.

 

Current team members: Lulseged Tamene, Quang Bao Le, Almut Brunner, Jens Liebe, Paul L.G. Vlek

References:
Le, Q.B.; Park, SJ.; Vlek, P.L.G.; Cremers, A.B. 2008. Land-use dynamic simulator (LUDAS): a multi-agent system model for simulating spatio-temporal dynamics of coupled human-landscape system. I. Structure and theoretical specification. Ecological Informatics, 135 – 153.

Tamene, L.; Vlek, P.L.G. 2007. Assessing the potential of changing land use for reducing soil erosion and sediment yield of catchments: a case study in the highlands of northern Ethiopia. Soil Use and Management, 23, 82 – 91.