G.I.S. and Fuzzy Sets for the Land Suitability Analysis

Abstract

This paper reports about uncertainty in defining boundaries, which assume an institutional significance when transposed in planning prescription. Every discipline involved in environmental planning uses different approaches to represent its own vision of reality. Geological sciences or hydraulics evaluate risks by consistent mathematical models which are relevantly different to non linear models emploied in the field of ecology, and at the same time information about significance and value of cultural heritage in a given environment does not easily correspond to a value attribution. These questions represent an interesting field of research, related with the different character of information deriving from different disciplinary approaches, and with the more appropriate way of combining the same information. Different ways of managing values correspond to different ways of giving information. The result is a set of discrete representations of the physical space which correspond to a set of different values referring to areas which are considered homogeneous according to each disciplinary point of view, but very difficult to combine to create landscape units according to the whole of disciplines. The present paper illustrates a reflection on a G.I.S. application in a land suitability study on a sub-regional area of Southern Italy. Emerging questions are related to the need to combine contributions of all environmental information which are represented at different scales, with different interpretative models, with different precision of identification of landscape unit, etc. © Springer-Verlag 2004.