Decision Support System based Site Quality Evaluation for Plantation

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of a Web-based decision support system for site quality evaluation of plantation (SSQEP). SSQEP is an operational automatic evaluation tool that helps farmers in estimating site quality and predicting the growth performance of trees. The SSQEP consists of three subsystems: (i) site quality evaluation for forest land subsystem; (ii) site quality evaluation for non-forest land subsystem; and (iii) stand growth and yield prediction subsystem. Expert system principle was adopted in the site quality evaluation for non-forest land. An automatic knowledge acquisition module provides a user-friendly interface to domain experts for entering and storing domain-specific knowledge. The knowledge base was used to store and manage the knowledge of domain experts, which is presented as rules and facts. Inference engine was designed and implemented to use forward reasoning mechanism to search the site quality evaluation knowledge. Furthermore, two site quality evaluation methods for forest land (i.e., site index and growth model methods) were designed in the SSQEP. After evaluating site quality, the stand growth and yield were predicted by a graph.