Collaborators
modelling your own site? get in touch
The Landuse Analyst web app currently runs a preloaded scenario — Tell esh Shuna North — but includes interactive tools to explore the landscape. You can click to set new settlement seeds, draw rivers or lakes to simulate travel friction, toggle Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, and view the results in 3D.
We have also built the foundations for a multi-tenant system (including user accounts, custom project workspaces, and scenario management). These features are currently in an invitational beta testing phase as we refine the custom data upload and validation pipeline.
If you would like to participate in the beta, or if you prefer to have the author run your catchment analysis manually using the underlying QGIS plugin (or its pure-Python engine), please get in touch directly. Collaborating on real research cases helps us shape the design of the user upload and workspace tools.
What I need from you
None of the below is strict; reach out even if you only have some of these. Often the conversation surfaces things faster than a complete data package would.
- A digital elevation model (DEM)
- For your site and the surrounding area, ideally at 10–30 m resolution. GeoTIFF, GRASS-ASCII, or Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF all work. If you don't have one, often a global SRTM-derived DEM at 30 m is good enough to begin with.
- Settlement coordinates
- A coordinate pair in the DEM's CRS, with the EPSG code so we can confirm the projection.
- Suitability information
- What cells are suitable for which crops or grazing. The engine is designed to compose any combination of factors (such as soil types, slope bands, elevation ranges, rainfall patterns, salinity, and crop-rotation effects). You can provide these either as pre-composed raster layers, or as a written description of the ecological criteria for each crop and animal.
- Target hectarages
- How much land your inhabitants are estimated to have cultivated. The thesis derives these from population estimates × dietary proportions × per-crop yields — we can do the same for your site if you have a population estimate.
- Period + context
- What time horizon, what region, and what kinds of research questions you're hoping to address. Landuse Analyst is designed to model not just static catchments, but alternative scenarios including multi-year fallow rotations, crop-failure/drought responses, mutual-aid between neighbouring settlements, and trade relationships.
What you'll get back
- A worked-through catchment for your settlement at your chosen targets, with the cost surface + catchment mask as GeoTIFFs you can drop into your own GIS.
- A short writeup of the methodological assumptions specific to your scenario, suitable for inclusion in a methods section.
- Provisional results you can iterate on — change the diet proportions, the population, the suitability criteria, and we re-run.
Send an inquiry
Fill in the form below to draft a structured email — your mail client will open with the fields pre-populated. Nothing is sent to a server from this page; the inquiry goes through your own email client.
Prefer plain email? hello@arkygeek.com works directly.