Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, has announced a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop a decision support software application for land management.

Building on an application developed by Clark Labs at the Graduate School of Geography for use in land change analysis, prediction, and the examination of impacts on habitat and biodiversity, the new suite of tools will incorporate an integrated environment for land allocation planning; enhanced tools for habitat management; and adaptation planning tools for climate change, including the ability to downscale climate projections and assess their impact on crop suitability and species distributions. The software also will include ecosystem service valuation procedures from the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) toolkit developed by the Natural Capital Project.

According to the university, land cover change occurs as a result of many forces, and the impacts of such change are wide and far-reaching, particularly for habitat, biodiversity, and human populations. The new application will be used to analyze such reverberations and will have the capacity to evaluate multiple criteria in land change scenarios and provide solutions that consider various objectives.

"Partnering with the researchers at the Natural Capital Project, we have a wonderful opportunity to develop a robust, integrated, and user-friendly suite of tools that incorporates our expertise in land cover change with their expertise in ecosystem services," said Clark Labs director J. Ronald Eastman. "Such conservation and land management tools are desperately needed, and it is our hope, through the generosity of the Moore Foundation, to make a significant contribution to this effort."