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This course offers landuse planners from a full suite of disciplines (forestry, energy, mining, agriculture, transportation, urban growth form, wildlife managers, fire management, etc.) an opportunity to learn how to use ALCES 4, A Landscape Cumulative Effects Simulator.  ALCES® is a landscape simulator that enables planners, resource managers, society, and the scientific community to explore and quantify dynamic landscapes subjected to single or multiple human landuse practices and various natural disturbance regimes. ALCES assists planners and resource managers in identifying strategic-level social, economic, and environmental challenges associated with landscape sustainability and in discovering mitigation strategies for issues related to flows of natural resources.  

“While we live in the present, we are affected by the past and inevitably head into the future. It would be of considerable comfort to know what the future brings. Rather than wait for it, to invoke choice rather than chance, we can direct the future with the decisions of today. ALCES is one, of very few tools, that gives us the capability to understand today’s actions and the implications for tomorrow. If we wish to move forward intelligently, ALCES can inform the pathway to tomorrow.” 

- Dr. Lorne Fitch  - Adjunct Professor, University of Calgary

1. Understand the data requirements of urban, municipal, regional, or provincial scale projects that use ALCES 4.
2. Understand how to install and open ALCES, enter input data relating to landuses and natural disturbance regimes, complete “what-if” simulations, and generate output relevant to the performance of social, economic, and ecological variables.  
3. Be able to forecast the flow of natural resources such as water, timber, hydrocarbons, mineral ores, crops, livestock and wildlife population.
4. Be able to forecast populations and subpopulations of humans, and the costs of infrastructure and health of alternative urban and municipal designs
5. Be able to generate the economic benefits (GDP, revenues, rents) and costs (such as infrastructure construction and maintenance) associated with alternative land use trajectories
6. Become familiar with using ALCES to explore alternative trajectories of natural disturbance regimes (climate, climate change, fire regimes, insect outbreaks, coastal erosion)
7. Have completed challenging hands-on exercises that demonstrate the potential effects of multiple land uses on landscape composition and natural resource flows and values, including forestry, energy, mining,  agriculture, transportation, protected areas, tourism, and urbanization.

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