Interactive Landscape Simulation Tool and Participatory Process for Sustainable Land Management Assessment and Planning in Tunisia

Sustainable land management (SLM) at scale is essential for achieving land degradation neutrality and improving community livelihoods. In practice, promoting SLM at watershed scale faces many decision-making problems that are mainly caused by diversities of the environment and stakeholder needs/preferences. An Integrated LAnd Management Planning Tool (iLAMPT) has been developed to facilitate stakeholders’ land management assessment at watershed scale. The tool is spatially explicit, and with a menu-oriented interactive graphical user interface that can aid stakeholders to define systematically planning criteria, plan SLM options for concrete land use types and site conditions, and visualize potential impacts over the watershed. The tool interfaces are designed to guide users through menus that: (1) allow technical users to adjust model coefficients, visualizing input parameters; (2) enable end-users to define input scenarios of land use and management practices versus site conditions and evaluate potential consequences; (3) allow viewing results in tabular, graphical or map form side-by-side; and (4) (re)-evaluate the respective impacts of planning scenarios considering trade-offs. The tool was empirically calibrated and adaptively designed in the Rmel watershed in the Zaghouan governorate of Tunisia. The core sub-model on distributed soil erosion was evaluated using sedimentation data measured on field. Using the specified iLAMPT tool in a participatory process, stakeholders in the study watershed are being supported for exploring (1) scenarios of landscape planning for land use and management practices, (2) examining the efficiency of the planning scenarios on soil erosion amounts, and thereby (3) informed about best management practices targeted at locations where the practices are needed most. Since the tool allows end-users define planning scenarios/options and provide outputs in a spatially explicit and timely responsive way, it can assist in effective discussions over landscape planning where land degradation neutrality is the ultimate goal.