People in Ecosystems Watershed Integration (PEWI) is a simple web-based educational game designed to assist people in multidimensional land-use decision making. 

Too often, the impacts of land use choices are only evaluated in one dimension, be it ecological, social, or economic. Designing landscapes to maximize a single objective often results in poor performance in one or more of the remaining objectives. Integrated approaches are sorely needed if all the goals society holds for our landscapes are to be met.

PEWI is a university-created game, funded by generous donors and grants, and it is free and at no cost to users, including institutional users, like schools. Teachers use the game with students, and extension educators and watershed coordinators use the game with landowners and other stakeholders. 

PEWI helps people understand the impacts of 15 agricultural and natural land uses on biodiversity, water quality, wildlife, production agriculture, and complex topics such as carbon sequestration. Users manipulate three years of land cover in a virtual 6000-acre watershed to design land use based on their own goals and perceptions. As they interact with the model, they confront tradeoffs in ecosystem service outcomes.

The model computes a variety of outputs—nutrient pollution, stream sediment delivery, biodiversity levels, and agricultural production—to guide landscape design. These results are presented in both visual and numeric formats, including a flyover (drone) mode.

Objectives

PEWI addresses our need to balance agricultural production with other environmental benefits, including clean water, abundant wildlife, and recreation, among others. While PEWI focuses on the US Corn Belt, its lessons can apply to agricultural regions globally. Through fun and game-like interactivity, PEWI invites users to consider both compatibility and trade-offs among the multiple objectives they hold for agricultural landscapes. We thereby hope to inform more sustainable landscape decision-making within all sectors of our society. Our objectives in offering PEWI are threefold:

• Provide teachers with a digital game-based learning unit that meets national standards in science and agriculture.
• Provide non-formal educators of adults with a simulation that can be part of a larger conversation related to tradeoffs at the community and regional level related to ecosystem services and production agriculture.
• Network with other simulation teams on ways to become an interface for science and learning, and how to add land uses and features to enlarge the experience for the user.

To ensure the constant improvement and widespread availability of PEWI, we have made the tool open source and offer multiple opportunities to collaborate. To learn more about how to contribute to the science or code that drives PEWI, visit our collaborate page. 

Video Tutorials

Additional Information

For background reading, check out the paper, PEWI: A Web-based Learning Tool for Evaluating Ecosystem Service Tradeoffs from Watersheds, freely downloadable from the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.

To view the science model behind PEWI, explore our interactive flow map: PEWI Science Model.

A Team Effort

A team created PEWI over several years under the direction of Dr. Lisa Schulte Moore. Hear Dr. Schulte Moore's story (Vimeo) 

We will continue to develop PEWI to improve features, design, and usability. 

In the future, we envision expanding PEWI even further—potentially with more land covers and indicators, additional complexities, other land-use contexts, and more interactive graphics. Our vision includes incorporating ecosystem services indicators, such as the nutritional value of food produced and energy produced from biomass. The possibilities for PEWI are endless, and feedback from users will be an instrumental part of future development efforts.

Email pewi@iastate.edu with questions and feedback for the development team.