Framework For Site Selection Research Articles

Applying Spatial Data Mining for Watershed Site Selection to Perform Field Sampling

This study presents a systematical site selection framework for a wide-range survey. Spatial data mining was used to delimit three classes of pollution potential areas. Results show that pollution samples highly correlate with the classified potentially contaminated areas. For example, most of the soil pollution and water pollution appear under the high potentially contaminated area (HPCA). In contrast, under the low potentially contaminated area (LPCA), no pollution was discovered. These findings shows that the proposed approach is fairly reliable and can be applied to wide-range of areas within a river watershed to determine site selections for performing field sampling.

Alternative targets and economic efficiency of selecting protected areas for biodiversity conservation in boreal forest

We examine the relative merits of alternative forest biodiversity targets, which give different weights to species according to their conservation status and abundance. A site selection framework is used for choosing the habitat-protection strategy that maximizes biodiversity subject to an upper bound on funding with six alternative conservation goals. By using Finnish data on old-growth forests, we found that alternative conservation goals yield different benefit-cost tradeoffs. Goals relying on complementarity between protected stands result in great marginal costs at a high conservation level. Therefore, under these conditions it may not be economically efficient to establish a large conservation network to protect all species in a given area. In contrast, a large conservation network is more likely to be justified when the habitat-protection strategy focuses on species abundance. The trade-offs between alternative objectives are explicitly measured by incrementally varying the weights given to the species. We found that the targets for all species representation and species abundance can largely be met simultaneously. Protecting red-listed species reduces overall species coverage and species abundance particularly at low budget levels.

A unified framework for site selection and business forecasting using ANP

This paper reports an on-going application of the Analytic Network Process (ANP) in the context of a non-profit organization: The Latin American Studies Association (LASA). This institution organizes a large international conference every eighteen months and needs to estimate conference attendance in advance (for logistic purposes) as well as selecting a host city where the combination of hotel infrastructure, conference costs, and so on, makes it a sound financial choice. In this paper, ANP will be used to: first, create a model to predict the relative number of attendees to the forthcoming 2009 LASA conference; and second, to create a Benefit-Cost-Risk (BCR) model to select the most suitable Latin American city as the conference site. This paper shows how the combination of these two ANP models, one for prediction and one for selection, can be used together for effective decision-making.

A Cost-Efficient Approach to Selecting Forest Stands for Conserving Species: A Case Study from Northern Fennoscandia

Abstract We analyze cost-efficient conservation of boreal old-growth forests using three variants of the site selection framework. In all variants, the aim is to maximize biodiversity subject to a given resource constraint. Our benchmark, an integrated site selection model, takes into account both ecological and commercial values of the stands and defines a cost-efficient solution to conservation problems. The other two models are called the ecological and the penny-pincher models. The ecological model reflects current conservation practices and is based on ecological criteria. The penny-pincher model reflects an ad hoc preservation used earlier in many countries, which leads to selection of the stands having the lowest commercial value irrespective of their ecological features. Using Finnish data on forest dwelling species and commercial values of the stands, we demonstrate that the integrated model leads to 9–19% higher conservation cost-efficiency than the other two models. We also show that the xeric forest type may be underrepresented in the current old-growth forest preservation network in this region. FOR. SCI. 50(4):527–539.