Development of Integrated Web-Based Land Decision Support System Aiming Towards the Implementation of Policies: an integrated forestry approach

LANDSUPPORT is a Horizon2020 project (Call RUR-03-2017) officially launched on May 1st 2018 and will last 42 months. LANDSUPPORT is coordinated by CRISP Research Centre of the University of Napoli Federico II and it involves 19 beneficiaries, including 17 from European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Spain) and 2 from non-European countries (Malaysia and Lebanon).

LANDSUPPORT aims at building up a web-based smart geoSpatial Decision Support System (S-DSS), which shall provide a set of operational tools devoted to: i) support sustainable agriculture and forestry; ii) evaluate trade-off between land uses; iii) contribute to implementation, impact and delivery of about 20 European land policies and selected 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals including climate change resilience goals.

The vision of LANDSUPPORT is rooted in a change in paradigm for both soil/landscape scientists and also public institutions, aiming at overcoming both current disciplinary and policy fragmentation over landscape issues and offering integrated geospatial knowledge archive which can be used directly and freely by any end-user and institution.

Within LANDSUPPORT a family of tools is under development to support sustainable forest management as required by EU Forestry Strategy, specifically designed for forest owners and policy makers to adopt best forest practices. LANDSUPPORT will use EO data and simulation modelling in order to:

• map and monitor forest productivity;
• identify forestry best practices to increase climate change resilience;
• assess the impact of selected forest best practices indicators and criteria with modelling applications;
• quantify forest ecosystem services through the development of relevant indicators for a preliminary FES estimation also according to forest types.

The forestry tools will work at different geographic scales including EU Member States (Austria, Italy, Hungary) and European Regions (Marchfeld, Campania Region and Keszthely Mountain District), plus local test-site in Slovenia.

The above-mentioned objectives will be achieved through the integration of existing available databases and the development of high performance modelling chains. Process based models (PBMs) will be applied to local and an upscaled at regional level quantifying uncertainties, taking into account forest structural complexity and soil properties in an integrated Forest Ecosystem Models (FEMs). 3D-CMCC-FEM model (Collalti et al., 2014) will be implemented in LANDSUPPORT and will investigate carbon and water fluxes, including biomass pools and their partitioning, for complex multi-layer forests. Thanks to parallel processing and HPC the project will enable to tackle the mentioned objectives and actions at the local scale, but integrated over large areas.

The strong linkage between databases, modelling and graphical user interface (GUI) in LANDSUPPORT will provide both large and operational set of tools to be applied to forest management to be strongly connected to land policies. With respect to climate change mitigation policies in Europe and to use of land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector to mitigate national greenhouse gas emissions (EU decision 529/2013) LANDSUPPORT will develop a tool for supporting LULUCF reporting in forestry and agricultural lands. For instance, LANDSUPPORT will provide an evidence base approach (rooted in EO and modelling) to verify the methodologies and data currently used in the LULUCF.

In LANDSUPPORT we intend to combine field surveys, satellite and LiDAR data and then to run several forest models applying different forest management modules within different climatic scenario. The user will interact with the system through a user-friendly GUI, design its own AOI, save it on the server and query it (e.g. identifying areas with higher biomass productivity, carbon stock, soil characteristics, etc.). The expected outputs might consist of reports containing data and information useful for forest management, also at cadastral unit scale, maps and tables.

In literature a very large range of available DSS tools can be found for facing agriculture, forestry and environmental issues. However, these are typically designed to tackle a specific problem/scale/end-user group. Instead, LANDSUPPORT aims at managing land resources in an integrated way: i) developing integrated interdisciplinary modelling chains and approaches for informed decision making; ii) data management (WP2, WP4) and modelling (WP3) capable to handle very high spatial detail using, as far as possible, physically based modelling engines (also HPC codes) such as biophysical modelling thus including evaluation of uncertainty; iii) developing procedures (type of modelling, data, open source, HPC) to allow replicability elsewhere (WP6); iv) developing applications in agriculture, forestry  and spatial planning for  operationalizing SDGs. By achieving the above interconnected scientific and technical objectives –will deliver RUR03-2017 challenges/scope and by doing that will contribute to implementation, impact and delivery of about 20 European land policies. We believe that LANDSUPPORT:

-can effectively support the decision-making process;

-can provide a set of tools (forestry, ecotourism, spatial planning) offering a new an integrated forestry approach at landscape scale;

-can be replicable at any other EU and no-EU countries.

For more information please contact:

Gina Marano (PhD student): gin.marano@live.com

Fabio Terribile (Prof, LANDSUPPORT Project Coordinator): fabio.terribile@unina.it

See also: https://landsupport.eu

References

Terribile F, Agrillo A, Bonfante A, Buscemi G, Colandrea M, D’Antonio A, De Mascellis R, De Michele C, Langella G, Manna P, Marotta L, Mileti FA, Minieri L, Orefice N, Valentini S, Vingiani S, Basile A (2015) A web-based spatial decision supporting system for land management and soil conservation. SOLID EARTH 6(3):903–928, DOI 10.5194/se-6-903-2015.

Collalti A, Perugini L, Santini M, Chiti T, Nolè A, Matteucci G, Valentini R (2014) A process-based model to simulate growth in forests with complex structure: Evaluation and use of 3D-CMCC Forest Ecosystem Model in a deciduous forest in Central Italy. Ecological Modelling, Volume 272: 362-378, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2013.09.016

Teobaldelli M, Cona F, Saulino L, Migliozzi A, D'Urso G, Langella G, Manna P, Saracino A (2017). Detection of diversity and stand parameters in Mediterranean forests using leaf-off discrete return LiDAR data, Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 192,2017, Pages 126-138, DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2017.02.008.