Evaluation, Application, and Opportunities of Land-Use Decision Support System in Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

Agricultural land affects different domains of ecosystem services, such as the supply of food and raw materials, but it also affects climate regulation in terms of carbon storage, water, and nutrient cycles, and thus water quality. However, in recent years, agricultural land has become a very limited resource and there has been an intensification of soil degradation processes due to incorrect land management. This contraction has not led to a loss of agricultural production due to the progressive introduction of new production techniques which have made possible both an increase in productivity per hectare and the intensification of livestock activities. At the same time, there has been a change in the way of performing agriculture, moving to a "multifunctional" agriculture which combines the production of food with the production of public goods and services (protection of biodiversity, landscape protection, water resource management, etc.). The effects caused by the reduction of agricultural land and change in land use, however, are different, and include the loss of organic matter, and alteration of the landscape, ecosystem, climatic sphere and the hydrogeological structure.

For these reasons, the consumption of agricultural land and change in land use have aroused great interest due to the economic, environmental, and social costs that the phenomenon itself entails. Correct land use planning therefore represents an important element both for the protection of the environment and for the support of multifunctional agriculture. While land use performs many social functions and contributes to sustainable development, it is often unclear how these functions are affected by policy decisions and common drivers of land use change, such as economic development, climate change and demographic. To better manage this phenomenon, a decision support system (DSS) could provide valuable help. A DSS is a software system that provides support to all those who must make strategic decisions when facing problems that cannot be solved with the models of operations research. Therefore, a DSS, using various tools, allows for an increase in the effectiveness of the analysis as it is able to generate a set of alternative options that the decision-maker can evaluate. The alternative options, prefigured in this way, can be taken directly into consideration, or used to refine the analysis. This way, the decision-maker can retain full control of the decision-making process while also structuring the process itself correctly.

In the last decade, the application of decision support systems (DSS) in agriculture and the environment has increased rapidly, with the aim of establishing optimal land use patterns which are balanced trade-offs between achieving objectives and reducing the assessed risks. As such, this Special Issue intends to evaluate the development and implementation of DSS for land use, linking the results of land use models with the decision-making process of socio-economic and land use management in order to identify new directions for the development of the DSS.

Dr. Concetta Cardillo
Dr. Marco Vassallo
Dr. Claudia Di Bene
Guest Editors

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• decision support systems
• sustainable land uses
• ecosystem services
• vulnerability
• resilience
• policy and management strategies
• models and analytical tools for land use management