Multicriteria-Spatial Decision Support Systems (MC-SDSS) are increasingly popular tools in decision-making processes and in policy making, thanks to their significant new capabilities in the use of spatial or geospatial information. Many spatial problems are complex and require the use of integrated analysis and models. The present paper illustrates the development of a MC-SDSS approach for studying the ecological connectivity of the Piedmont Region in Italy.

The forest transition (FT) hypothesis implies that changes in a region's forest cover follow a determinable pattern of decline and later re-expansion over time, which is supposed to be similar across regions and countries. Such a uniform pattern – if empirically proven and quantified – might help in establishing REDD+ baselines (i.e., references against which reductions in the emissions from deforestation and forest degradation of developing countries could be measured, and subsequently be rewarded).

The inference rules relating land characteristics to suitability class are crucial to the estimation of agricultural land suitability. In fuzzy logic modeling for agricultural land evaluation, the fuzzy inference, based on membership functions and rule aggregation, is constructed with predetermined evaluation criteria, including value ranges for fuzzy linguistic terms, and weights of land variables. However, most existing evaluation criteria systems are built on the basis of expert knowledge and can be highly subjective and contain uncertainty.

A land suitability study covering an area of 56,655 square kilometers was carried out for the cultivation of a halophytic bioenergy crop, Salicornia bigelovii, in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi using data collected from an extensive soil survey (scale of 1:100,000). Two simple limitation methods (referred to in the paper as the conservative and weighted methods) were used to interpolate soil map unit data for qualitative evaluation of the land.

The geological environment has been heavily polluted by chemical substances over the past few decades. Pollution sources located on the earth’s surface or underground have affected the quality of the environment. A significant amount of impact could be reduced if the allocation of potential pollution sources was based on an evaluation of environmental conditions. The main objective of this study was to develop a methodology for the allocation of potential pollution sources by employing GIS and multi-criteria evaluation techniques.

This work describes a methodology for Strategic Environmental Assessment of urban areas in Latin America based on the recently approved European Planning Directive, and applies it to the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (Chile). The method is based on the Land Suitability Index (LSI), a cartographic GIS-based index originally developed for the region of Barcelona (Spain) and aimed at determining the suitability of each point in a region for urban development, considering three sub-indexes: (i) Naturalness, (ii) Ecological Connectivity and (iii) Natural Risk.

In our research we investigated the optimal utilization of land resources for agricultural production in Tabriz County, Iran. A GIS-based Multi Criteria Decision Making land suitability analysis was performed. Hereby, several suitability factors including soils, climatic conditions, and water availability were evaluated, based on expert knowledge from stakeholders at various levels. An Analytical Hierarchical Process was used to rank the various suitability factors and the resulting weights were used to construct the suitability map layers.

Urban construction land suitability evaluation (UCLSE) is a complex system engineering and the basis for rational use of the limited urban land resources in China. It has an important practical value on urban construction land use planning and management from the angle of methodology. As a widely used technique, traditional multi-criteria evaluation based on GIS (MCE-GIS), is not suitable for UCLSE. This study develops an improved MCE-GIS method which could be more suitable for UCLSE based on urban complex ecological system theory and the summary of the shortcomings of traditional MCE-GIS.

Selection of rural buildings’ site is a complex process to solve a discordant relation with other components of rural landscapes and needs many diverse criteria to deal with its situation. This paper presents a multi-criteria spatial decision analysis approach using geographic information system (GIS) technique for evaluating the suitability of rural buildings site selection with a case study in Hervás (northern Extremadura region), Spain.

Two strategies are assessed to increase wheat production in the water-scarce Karkheh River Basin (KRB) in Iran to meet targets by the year 2025. The strategies proposed are (a) to increase yields in the current irrigated and rainfed wheat areas and (b) to increase the area under rainfed wheat through land conversion. Crop water consumption, based on satellite remote sensing and crop yield data, was used to estimate crop water productivity (CWP) in irrigated and rainfed wheat areas in five sub-basins.

Agricultural land suitability evaluation for crop production is a process that requires specialized geo-environmental information and the expertise of a computer scientist to analyze and interpret the information. This paper presents ALSE, an intelligent system for assessing land suitability for different types of crops in tropical and subtropical regions (e.g. mango, banana, papaya, citrus, and guava) based on geo-environmental factors that automates the process of evaluation and illustrates the results on an attribute table.