SmartScape™: A web-based decision support system for assessing the tradeoffs among multiple ecosystem services under crop-change scenarios

Abstract

Agricultural lands have experienced rapid changes during the last decade. In the absence of preventative crop change policies, these changes can affect multiple ecosystem services simultaneously. The objective of this paper is to describe a web-based spatial decision support system (SDSS), which we call the SmartScape™, that helps policymakers to evaluate the consequence of crop changes on various ecosystem services in agriculture landscapes. This paper specifically provides an overview of a newly developed SDSS architecture that: (1) integrates multiple open-source software tools to build a user-friendly web client; (2) integrates a variety of spatial and temporal data and environmental models, into an interactive environment to allow stakeholders with various interests to build crop change scenarios; and (3) allows stakeholders to evaluate and identify suitable crop change policies by visualizing the tradeoffs among multiple ecosystem services in a timely manner. We demonstrate the utility of this architecture through (4) an analysis of a crop change scenario for an agriculture-dominated landscape in Dane County, Wisconsin, USA. Assessment of participant feedback from potential users (group of stakeholders from Dane County as well as group of scientists who were experts in various disciplines, such as computer science, landscape ecology, agriculture, water quality, soil chemistry and climate change) reveals that this SmartScape™ is an effective tool to show the general consequences of various types of crop changes for developing effective crop changes policy in Wisconsin, USA.