Current situation and prospect of grassland management decision support systems in China

Abstract

China, with wide grassland areas of the second rank throughout the world, is faced with a severe challenge on how to manage its vast and degenerating/degenerated grassland. Computer and network technologies are more and more widely applied in grassland production, research and education, which is just a greatly encouraging field. Tremendous achievements have been made in grassland management decision support system (GMDSS) research in developed countries at present, but there is still a long way to obtain a great development for developing countries, such as China. This paper reviewed the research progress and current situation in the GMDSS research and application in China. Concept models and empirical models are still hugely focused on the corresponding research fields in China, but the integrated GMDSS has not been well developed. Therefore, Chinese scientists must develop the integrated models from the existing models, and accordingly sinicize the GMDSS of models used in the developed countries for availably application. In the other hand, there is a same direction of research and development about the GMDSS not only for developed countries but also for China, which is going to be combined with internet, 3S (GIS, RS and GPS) and virtual technology. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.