ADAPTION OF THE LUCI FRAMEWORK TO ACCOUNT FOR DETAILED FARM MANAGEMENT A CASE STUDY EXPLORING POTENTIAL FOR NUTRIENT MITIGATION USING DATA FROM THE SOUTHLAND DEMONSTRATION FARM
This paper discusses recent progress in adapting the Land Utilisation and Capability Indicator (LUCI) framework to take account of the impact of detailed farm management on water, sediment and nutrient delivery to waterways. LUCI is a land management decision support framework which examines the impact of current and potential interventions on a variety of outcomes, including flood mitigation, water supply, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, erosion, sediment and nutrient delivery to waterways, and agricultural production. It searches for "win win" solutions and cost effective, targeted mitigation options from sub field level to landscape and/or national scale simultaneously. It is therefore ideally placed to assist with decision making across multiple scales, such as informing the current debates about how best to implement nutrient regulation at farm, catchment and regional scales. However, past applications of LUCI have inferred land management from nationally available land cover categorisations, so historically it lacked the capacity to discriminate between differences in more detailed management (tillage information, type of irrigation system, stocking numbers and type, etc. Recently a collaboration with Ravensdown Limited has commenced. LUCI is being further developed within New Zealand to take in a range of more detailed management information, which can be entered directly to LUCI or easily integrated via an OVERSEER farm file. It is anticipated that this enhanced ability, combined with the framework's existing capacity to support multi scale decision making, will provide a decision support tool to New Zealand's farming community that complements OVERSEER and other available support tools. Example output and ongoing "validation" of LUCI's performance simulating nutrient loads and concentrations at the farm scale are presented using data from the Southland Demonstration Farm.