A Decision Support System for Farmland Preservation: Integration of Past and Present Land Use

Abstract

Preservation of agricultural land is a common need in many States and regions in the European Union and worldwide. Underlying reasons for this need are diverse, as are the approaches chosen to facilitate farmland preservation. Zoning is very often the main instrument used to protect agricultural land from urbanization and afforestation. This chapter presents a multi-criteria decision analysis system intended to support zoning decisions. In this study, parcels are used as the unit of analysis. The system of analysis integrates biophysical criteria related to the productivity of land, structural factors related to the efficiency of farming activities and landscape configuration as defined by present and past land use. As an intermediate step to define landscape configuration, a methodology for classification of historical aerial photographs is proposed, based upon object-oriented classification of individual land parcels with the aid of supervised decision trees and ancillary textural information. The resulting decision support system takes the form of a parcel rating system, allowing end users to identify agricultural areas for which protective zoning should be implemented by selecting progressively lower scoring parcels until the desired total area (ideally based upon demand estimates) is satisfied.