Abstract
Nowadays, Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) is on the political agenda
as one of the main objectives in order to respond to the increasing
degradation processes affecting soils and territories. Nevertheless,
proper implementation of environmental policies is very difficult due to
a lack of the operational, reliable and easily usable tools necessary to
support political decisions when identifying problems, defining the
causes of degradation and helping to find possible solutions. It is
within this framework that this paper attempts to demonstrate that a new
type of Spatial Decision Support System (S-DSS) that is developed on a
Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure (GCI) might provide a valuable web-based
operational tool which could be offered to EU administrative units (e.g.
municipalities) so that they may better evaluate the state and the
impact of land degradation in their territories. The land degradation
data utilized were obtained from a platform named Trends.Earth, designed
to monitor land change by using earth observations, and post-processed
to correct some of the major artefacts relating to urban areas. The
S-DSS ([www.landsupport.eu](http://www.landsupport.eu/)) has also
been designed to encourage use by multi-user communities (from citizens
to scholars, associations and public bodies). Moreover, it supports the
acquisition, management and processing of both static and dynamic data,
together with data visualization and computer on-the-fly applications,
in order to perform modelling, all of which is potentially accessible
via the Web. The Land Degradation tool, is designed to support land
planning and management by producing data, statistics, reports and maps
for any EU area of interest. It is in line with this LDD special issue
which requires to report on “ advanced approaches and methods in
land-based geoSpatial Decision Support Systems…
implementation of S-DSS to address the various sustainable land
uses in different sectors such as …environmental and human
health”. The tool will be demonstrated through a short selection of
practical case studies where data, table and stats are provided to
challenge land degradation at different spatial extents. Currently there
are WEBGIS system to visualise land degradation maps but – to our
knowledge – this is the first SDSS tool enabling a customized LDN
reporting at any NUTS level for the entire EU territory.