Launching the Scotscape toolkit

After two years of designing and testing strategy games to help negotiate land use transitions in Scotland, it was time to expand our toolkit.

An issue often mentioned by people involved in Scottish land management is the difficulty of finding a way forward with stakeholders who have diverse priorities and perspectives; where attempting to reach not even compromise, but understanding, is challenging.

Since 2025, we’ve been building on the ScotScape strategy game to create a set of tools for land managers, land users, lawmakers, changemakers, and anyone looking to understand and facilitate discussions about the landscape around them.

The additions to the toolkit include

• re•flect - a landscape visualisation tool, which allows users to see what their landscape would look like with different land-uses and interventions, over a range of spacial and timescales.

• re-fract - a discussion analysis tool, which gives discussion facilitators and participants overviews of and insights into topics, conflicts, agreements, dynamics, and changes over the course of a discussion.

• NatureScot’s Natural Capital Tool - a digital map-based tool that lets users explore how different land uses will affect the services provided by their land, including air quality regulation, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, flood mitigation, pollinator habitats, and more.

Starting in March 2026, we’ll be working closely with partner organisations in Scotland to implement and adapt these tools, with the intention of making them useful to our partners, and more broadly to organisations working on land use negotiation in Scotland.