Database construction for conservation-oriented rural area planning

Abstract

Regardless of the level or scale, the fundamental requirement in the process of policy development or decision making in planning is the use of quality and efficient data infrastructure. This study describes the construction stages of such data infrastructure to form the basis of conservation-oriented strategic decision making in a participatory process considering the local and regional peculiarities of a particular rural area. By adopting a specific planning approach, it presents the differences of this data infrastructure from the data content in conventional upper scale planning approaches, and also identifies its contribution to ecological sensitivity and rural area classifications as its subsequent prerequisites. Construction stages of such infrastructure for upper and lower scales, which require working in GIS environment due to the scope and diversity of data, are explained in detail. This, at the same time, forms the initial phase of Conservation-Oriented Rural Area Planning known as KOKAP which is the adopted approach in this study. The system allows additional data diversity in case it is employed in different regions or locations. Superior aspects of the developed system are put forward by comparing the existing upper scale planning processes with the main principles of KOKAP and the related data infrastructure. Finally, the contributions of the study in identifying the ecological sensitivities at different planning levels, and rural area classifications at national and local levels are discussed.