Land suitability evaluation for agro-forestry: Definition of a web-based multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS): Preliminary results

Land suitability evaluation (LSE) is a widespread methodology that supports environmental managers and planners in analysing the interactions between location, development actions, and environmental elements. In the present paper, we discuss on a web-based multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) implemented to accomplish LSE for agro-forestry. We propose a MC-SDSS developed on a free open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) environment, accessible through a user-friendly geographical user interface (GUI) that allows to perform geospatial analyses. To this end, the MC-SDSS has been conceived as a multi-tier architecture, able to manage processes executable via OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) web processing services (WPSs) and produce output maps and data available via the largely used OGC services: web feature service (WFS), web coverage service (WCS) and web map service (WMS). In this first application, we chose the weighted linear combination (WLC) as decision rule to aggregate data, weighted by judgements provided by experts following the analytical hierarchy process (AHP).