Abstract
Demand for agricultural food production is projected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, putting at risk our clean water supply and prospects for sustainable development. Fragmentation-free land allocation (FF-LA) aims to improve returns on ecosystem services by determining both space partitioning of a study area and choice of land-use/land-cover management practice (LMP) for each partition under a budget constraint. In the context of large-scale industrialized food production, fragmentation (e.g., tiny LMP patches) discourages the use of modern farm equipment (e.g., 10- to 20-m-wide combine harvesters) and must be avoided in the allocation. FF-LA is a computationally challenging NP-hard problem. We introduce three frameworks for land allocation planning, namely collaborative geodesign, spatial optimization and a hybrid model of the two, to help stakeholders resolve the dilemma between increasing food production capacity and improving water quality. A detailed case study is carried out at the Seven Mile Creek watershed in the midwestern US. The results show the challenges of generating near-optimal solutions through collaborative geodesign, and the potential benefits of spatial optimization in assisting the decision-making process.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 226 |
Journal | ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI.
Keywords
- Collaborative geodesign
- Fragmentation
- Land allocation
- Optimization
- Spatial constraints
- Sustainability