From Land Evaluation to Spatio-temporal Decision Support on Afforestation (original) (raw)

Land evaluation delivers a classification and ranking of land units in an intervention zone according to their observed or modelled performance to produce quantity and quality of a given commodity or service . In contemporary land evaluation exercises, the geometric and semantic definition of the land units and their performance attributes are typically stored in a geospatial database. Statistical and geospatial (GIS) tools are then used to assess the land units and to present the results as suitability maps. When current land use and boundary conditions are considered, land evaluation answers the 'What ?' question: 'What is the current performance of a land unit and how does it compare to the other land units in the study area ?'. Rather 'What if ?' questions are at stake when hypothetical or potential use and/or conditions are evaluated.