Development And Application Of Agroforestry Decision Support System Based On GIS

Agroforestry is a comprehensive land use system, which can bring farmers economic benefits, control soil erosion, utilize the land resource reasonably and maintain its sustainable development during empoldering the hilly and mountainous slope land resource. There are some issues in agroforestry design according to farmers and agricultural managers lack of information, such as different agroforestry types, ecological conditions that the trees require, and also know little about products and environmental services which are provided by agroforestry system, management practices that the system needs. In this study, we developed an integrative decision support system through field survey, principal of Decision Support System and Geographical Information System for agroforestry design and decision. The main works were as follows:1) Development of GIS-based Decision Support System for agroforestry design. The system effectively integrated database, module base, method base and knowledge base, improve the efficiency of data access, exchange and output of result. Particularly, the system can impart farmers and agricultural managers about agroforestry potential, help them to carry out agroforestry practice reasonably. The result showed it was a useful tool by testifying in the study area.2) Enough parameters were confirmed for selecting appropriate trees in agroforestry design. With a user-friendly map interface and multi-menu, the user can select them conveniently, and then the system searches the appropriate trees and values the suitability of the selected trees in the studied area. GIS was integrated in the system, and plentiful data of ecological conditions were collected. System can easily display these data in map format, thus agroforestry design is based on expert knowledge instead of traditional experience.3) A large amount pf knowledge about agroforestry design was obtained by consulting expert and users' feedback, and represented in computer language format, then rules were built for selecting appropriate trees. Knowledge and inference machine were incorporate into module base, which can simplify the structure and improve efficiency.4) The system is built with a modular and flexible framework in which many specialists modules were incorporated. Adaptability and expansibility are characteristics of the system, and more modules can be appended thought the module base management system. The system can easily be applied other regions by modifying the attributedatabase and spatial database.