New frontiers in soil conservation and landscape management: Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure applied to Decision Support System

This work aims to present results from the use of Geospatial Decision Support (DSS) tools (LANDSUPPORT H2020 project) aiming to both the best multiscale soil conservation and land management and also to an easy landscape implementation of some important agroenvironmental regulation (e.g. EU directives). The background behind these applications refers to the evidence that some agriculture and environmental directives/regulation have an intrinsic complexity because they apply to soils and landscapes which have the well recognized "multiple functions" and dynamic behavior as a fundamental features. Then these DSS tools requires, as fundamental feature, to include and mix many different high qualities both static and dynamic digital information, engine and processing in order to be successfully applied. The presented tool has been developed in the framework of a "Web-based Spatial Decision Supporting System" and it will consider soil and landscape. Decision makers (individuals, groups of interests and public bodies) can have real-time (or near realtime) access to critical, accurate, complete and up-to-date spatial data held in multiple data stores. The system produces detailed spatial documents, report and maps on a series of questions including agriculture, environment and climate change. The tool is available to and it will also allow to integrate classical top-down decision with bottom-up contributions to landscape planning and managing. The tool, as prototype, is under development in Italy, Hungary, Austria and in an additional case study in Tunisia but its development will enable future applications in other areas. Among the several topics having a different level of complexity and already implemented in the DSS, we will show those concerning soil sealing and viticulture zoning (terroir). Emphasis will be on how combining digital soil databases, advanced digital soil mapping procedures (e.g. neural network analysis), physical-based modelling (i.e. soil-vegetation-atmosphere water balance to calculate crop water stress indexes) and land assessment. Finally, the high qualified tools (still under construction) and their main technical/scientific constraints, as those referring to the near real-time management of typical crops, will be discussed. We believe that this work shows that web based Spatial Decision Supporting System must become a priority in future research to make soil science playing a larger role in landscape management and conservation