NICER Urban Water Management with Neil Sang

As a part of the NICE NbS project, a new software suite was developed called NICER. NICER aims to support decision makers aiming to treat polluted urban water with Nature based Solutions. Developed by Neil Sang and Abdulgahni Hassan from Swedish Land University, the software was tested directly with interested parties from municipalities and universities.

We sat down with Dr. Neil Sang to ask a few questions about NICER:

What is NICER, and why was it developed as part of the NICE NbS project?

The overall objective of the NICE project was to find ways that NbS could be used to clean polluted urban water at source. When I was first contacted by CETIM to join the proposal for NICE the remit was essentially just to scale up the implications of NbS water treatment given the performance characteristics of the NbS to be developed within the project. The ambition of NICER has grown considerably over the course of the project, from a single model to a suite of modular software supporting a data-pipeline that gives decision makers direct access to the latest research on NBS.

What problem does NICER help solve in urban water management?

It helps explore options in a highly complex decision space.

For example, replacing a traditional water treatment plant means multiple different types of NbS would need to work together to treat the water in different ways at different stages. The larger the spatial scale, the more different sources of pollution there might be and the wider the range of options for treating this. The combinatorial complexity of all these options is impossible to consider manually, even for water treatment experts. NICER cannot provide the final design, but it can help reduce the complexity to a more manageable set of options for decision makers and experts to consider together.

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How does NICER make it easier to understand and plan Nature-based Solutions?

At the most basic level, the NICER database collates from the scientific literature examples of both typical pollution loadings from various activities around the world, and examples of NBS with their respective performance characteristics. But what really lifts the utility of that information is that the database records this in a set of standardized formats. Regardless of whether the NbS is a green wall or a rain garden or wetland etc, and regardless of whether the original scientific experiment reported its performance characteristics as a simple percentage or a more nuanced approach including uncertainties, NICER is able to interpret that information. From the users point of view, swapping one NbS for another is as simple as picking an alternative from a drop down list of options.

NICER is not an expert system. However, by making it fast and simple to set up or alter scenarios it is possible to compare many more options than if the process had to be undertaken manually.

Why is it important to model NbS at different scales, from a single house to an entire catchment?

Water pollution is an emergent problem, which means it is the product of many individual activities and decisions. Unlike centralized water treatment, there may be no single agency installing and maintaining all the NbS. Determining the right incentives that will ensure a resilient treatment network emerges we must understand how various local decisions will play out at larger scales.

How can NICER help cities make more resilient decisions about water and pollution?

I think its main potential is as a strategic tool, helping cities get a sense of the scale of investment needed in various types and sizes of NbS to supplement existing treatment options or to even replace some traditional investment. That might be in terms of specific interventions, or the impact of policies and incentives. It could help shift the question from “can we” to “how can we”.

Unsplash: Jack Coble

Can you give an example of how someone with no coding or GIS background can use NICER?

To use NICER Excel one simply selects from a drop down list an example source of polluted water, and example NBS to treat it. Click “play” and NICER will return the final outlet concentrations in a new workbook, that’s it! The QGIS module is similarly straight forward, providing a series of short forms to select options from. Of course, a confident user can build much more complicated scenarios too but that is going to take some practice.

What impact do you hope NICER will have as more cities turn to Nature-based Solutions?

Cities are certainly coming to see the value of NbS, but implementations are still often on a per-project basis. I hope NICER can encourage development of coordinated strategies combining projects and other incentives.

We’ve spoken a bit about the policy and decision-making side of the tool. In terms of the market, what specific gap in current hydrological or flood-modelling tools does NICER fill?

It uses the specific performance data for any scientifically validated NbS selected. It also provides a single, semantically consistent, object model from household unit to catchment scale.

How can companies integrate individual NICER modules into their existing modelling frameworks?

NICER comes in an R-Studio Server Docker container with a full R Studio IDE. That container can be accessed in a browser, or triggered via the Plumber API. The database of example loadings and example NbS is in also in a docker container on a Postgres Server and can be queried independently of NICE-R via SQL. NICERXL is built with VBA and runs locally, while NICE QGIS runs in a further Docker container, with Python scripting. Docker containers are all run via a private docker network on the localhost, so it is free to play with as much as you need — no tokens or subscriptions. You can add your own data while keeping it local, and the supplied docker YML file makes it easy to lock down NICER to your own security requirements.

Companies can integrate the code into their workflow, or if they do not want to integrate with R, the code and methods are fully documented so they can use the database directly. It is all available on a free, reuse permitted, open license. We only ask that you acknowledge the NICE project and our EU funding.

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What makes NICER’s focus on water-related NbS unique compared to other modelling tools?

Its ability to directly integrate all kinds of scientific performance data about any kind of NbS, and to do so at any scale from an individual house to a whole catchment.

How does NICER handle uncertainty in pollution loads and NbS performance, something commercial tools often struggle with?

The model directly represents the reported uncertainty in the scientific data. So if the reported data is a flat rate, then there will no uncertainty considered. If it’s a range, or a distribution with confidence intervals or even a linear or non-linear equation NICER manages this. Users can select the best, worst, or mean case or a random draw therein. Cumulative uncertainty across a system can then be estimated by Monte-Carlo but we haven’t built specific tools for doing that yet.

What does a typical integration pathway look like for a company wanting to add NbS modelling capacity?

It depends on what NICER is being integrated with of course, but if one assumes the objective is to integrate with a hydrological model or BIM, so loadings are being calculated elsewhere and tested against an NbS, I would start by building a text file that follows the simple structure of our NbS System and running that through the plummeR API.

How can NICER improve or complement existing flood modelling workflows?

NICER is focused on the value of NbS for removing pollutants from water. As such it should complement models that focus on how pollutants get into the water e.g. hydrology and flood management at larger scales and BIM at building scale.

What datasets and inputs are needed to get started with NICER XL or NICER QGIS?

Neither require any bespoke data as they are able to work from open data. However, if you have your own loadings data for a particular scenario, performance data for an NbS or an existing hydrological network that will of course make the results more relevant to your own circumstances.

Curious to learn more about how NICER can aid your modelling workflow and decision-making for urban water management? Check out this intro to the software.