TITLE:
Simulation Models and GIS Technology in Environmental Planning and Landscape Management
AUTHORS:
Giuliana Lauro
KEYWORDS:
Landscape Ecology; Ecological Network; Dynamical System; GIS Technology
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.5 No.3,
June
19,
2013
ABSTRACT: Landscape
protection that, in the past, has been mainly concerned with its historical, artistic
and cultural heritage, follows, nowadays, a systemic methodology that looks at landscape
as a high level aggregate of spatial, ecologically different units that interact
each other by exchanging energy and materials. Strategic environmental assessment, nowadays, has been adopted in Europe in landscape planning,
whose task is to verify the compatibility of territory transformations with respect
to their levels of criticality and vulnerability, to evaluate possible future scenarios
as consequence of interventions by checking if they are in line with preservation
and valorization of environmental. To this aim, we make here a short survey of three
different simulation models that can be used as Decision Support System in landscape planning and management. They adopt
tools of the Landscape Ecology and are based on GIS (Geographic Information System)
technology. The first one consists of a planar graph, the so called ecological graph, whose construction needs the computation of suitable indices
of environmental control, proper of Landscape Ecology, such as biodiversity, biological territorial capacity, connectivity. The planar graph, for the considered
environmental system, returns a picture of its actual ecological health condition
and provides very detailed indications and operational assistance for choosing among
possible ecological sustainable interventions. The second one, based on the data
used to construct the ecological graph, uses the least-cost path algorithm
from GIS technology in order to build an ecological network to prevent and
to reduce territorial fragmentation caused
by intense processes of urbanisation and industrialisation. At last, an integrated GIS-based approach is
developed combining an ecological graph model and a mathematical model based on a nonlinear differential equation
of logistic-type with harvesting to perform qualitative predictions on the
sustainability of a given territorial plan.