Geodiversity assessment with global and local spatial multicriteria analysis

Abstract

The paper reports on geodiversity assessments of three national parks in Poland, performed independently by experts and volunteers. Each national park selected for the study represents one of three morphogenetically different landscape types: mountains, uplands, and plains. The expert and volunteer assessment data sets were separately processed with two spatial multicriteria methods: Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) - also referred to in the paper as the global version of WLC, and Local Weighted Linear Combination (L-WLC) resulting in two geodiversity maps for each of the parks – one based on WLC and the other on L-WLC output data. The maps were qualitatively evaluated for their efficacy of capturing spatial heterogeneity and differentiating between high and low geodiversity of specific areas within the national parks. The expert-based maps were compared with the volunteer-based maps using statistical measures of association and similarity. The results show that L-WLC is more suitable for geodiversity mapping of mountainous areas characterized by high morphogenetic and morphometric diversity whereas WLC yields better results in less diverse areas such as uplands and lowlands. The use of data originating from volunteer-based assessment requires meeting internal and external data quality standards and should be treated with caution.