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

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Spatial Analysis and Location Modeling in Urban and Regional Systems

Part of the book series: Advances in Geographic Information Science ((AGIS))

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sample data is randomly divided into ten subsets. One subset is left out of model fitting process, and is used to assess classification accuracy; the process is then repeated nine more times until every sample observation has been used for accuracy assessment.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the planning team formed by GAU and LaboraTe-USC technicians for their opinions and ideas which contributed to this work. We also thank the anonymous reviewer, who provided many constructive and helpful comments that helped to improve our manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Land laboratory, Deptartment of Agricultural and Forest Engineering, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain

    Eduardo Corbelle-Rico, Inés Santé-Riveira & Rafael Crecente-Maseda

Authors
  1. Eduardo Corbelle-Rico
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  2. Inés Santé-Riveira
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  3. Rafael Crecente-Maseda
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Correspondence to Eduardo Corbelle-Rico .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geography & Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

    Jean-Claude Thill

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Corbelle-Rico, E., Santé-Riveira, I., Crecente-Maseda, R. (2018). A Decision Support System for Farmland Preservation: Integration of Past and Present Land Use. In: Thill, JC. (eds) Spatial Analysis and Location Modeling in Urban and Regional Systems. Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37896-6_8

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