ALCES® Municipality™
ALCES Municipality is a customized version of ALCES Integrator that is designed to assist planners of municipalities with the development of strategic plans. This spatially stratified simulator is customized for tracking the overlapping landuses and natural disturbance regimes of small to mid-sized landscapes (20,000 ha to 4 million ha) that are governed by municipal (or shires) governments. The major landuses tracked in Municipality include residential, industry, agriculture, transportation, tourism, recreation, mining, and oil and gas. The major natural disturbance regimes tracked in Municipality include fire, meteorology, climate change, insect outbreaks, storm events, avalanches, erosion, and gap dynamics of plant communities.
System Requirements
PC desktop computer running MS Windows OS (XP, Vista, Windows 7)
2.4 Ghz minimum recommended processor
6Gb minimum recommended RAM
500Gb minimum disk space
Other ALCES Products
ALCES Simulators:
Optimizer Plug-In:
ALCES Optimizer is designed to assist with target-based resource management and planning. It helps determine land-use strategies best suited for achieving management objectives. ALCES Optimizer can also be used as an exploratory tool to consider the land-use implications of a range of indicator targets. By directing planning towards promising land-use strategies and realistic management objectives, ALCES Optimizer has the potential to streamline the planning process. (...learn more)
ALCES Mapper:
ALCES Mapper is a companion mapping application for the ALCES model. As an ArcGIS® extension, ALCES Mapper generates maps illustrating the plausible location and extent of future land-use features and landscape types based on ALCES outputs and user-defined parameters. (...learn more)
An important consideration for municipal planners focuses on the costs of infrastructure construction, maintenance and occasionally reclamation. Municipality is configured to explore alternative urban and peri-urban growth strategies (building up vs growing out) and the consequences of these strategies on physical infrastructure and cost, anthropogenic footprint, transportation metrics and fuel consumption, walkability, and losses to ecological goods and services. Other foci of ALCES Municipality include simulating changes in:
- Water Supply and Demand
- Water Quality
- Waste Production and Management
- Areand Quality of Green (Natural) regions
- Infrastructure (transportation, electricity, waste) Construction and Maintenance Cost
- Changes in Agricultural Landbase
- Loss of Riparian Habitat
- Pet Populations
- Expansion of exotic invasive plant species
- Effects of Climate Change on water supply, water demand, and cropland composition
- Risk to Infrastructure from Flooding, Fire, Insect Outbreaks
Municipality runs fast (generally 50 seconds for a 100 year simulation) and reports out on a full complement of economic, ecological, and social indicators. To be most efficiently deployed, licensees of Municipality are encouraged to bring together disciplinarians of each of the major landuses and natural disturbance regimes to populate the model. Our experience at ALCES indicates that Municipality attributed for a municipal study area can be populated and report out on indicators within 3-5 months.Municipality is accompanied by the ALCES Data Input Sheet (Microsoft Excel) to expedite the entry of major assumptions for landuse and natural disturbance regimes. If desired by the client, simulation data can be readily exported from Municipality and imported into ALCES Mapper for the spatially explicit mapping of ecological, landscape, and economic indicators for each scenario. Read more about ALCES Mapper here .
Purchase
ALCES Municipality is available for purchase from the ALCES Group for $15,000 on a license basis described in writing in a license agreement. Licensees may use their original license for as long as they wish, but optional simulator updates are available on an annual basis for a cost of $5,000. All updates available within a year of the original Municipality purchase are free.
What does a Site License of Municipality Provide?
A site
license to Municipality provides a single seat for the client. For
companies who possess multiple offices in different cities, a
separate site license is required for each. It is acceptable to have Municipality running on multiple machines within a single geographic
office. Each license allows the user to simulate and save multiple
landscape study areas.
To run Municipality, the user must obtain a licensed copy of Stella (Research Version 9.13 or later) .
Please contact us for licensing inquiries.
Copyright © 2010 ALCES™ Landscape & Land-Use Ltd. All rights reserved.
