“The DSS platform developed by LANDSUPPORT is friendly, and you only need to make a little effort to understand its organization. The possibility of comparing the techniques we use in our daily work, which are very often of a heuristic nature, allowed us to obtain articulated answers and different scenarios according to the context settings and choices that one intends to propose, thanks to the models/tools that LANDSUPPORT offers. Having tools that apply models over large territorial areas is of great help for those who study or implement policies in the “environmental” sector.

European directives, for example, do not say how to implement regulations; they delegate to the national and regional policy-makers. Technicians therefore have a great need for tools capable of proving as rigorously as possible how to apply regulations and what impact they will have in environmental terms.

The platform is able to offer the political decision-makers not only one but several different scenarios for the final choices to be proposed to the community.”

“What I like about the Landsupport DSS is that all aspects of land use are taken into account on European, national and regional level. The full range of tools that comprises the decision support systems allows to understand land use and land use change from various perspectives. Not only the current state is in the system, it is also possible to work with past time series and with futures scenarios to understand past and future land take and land degradation.

The Environment Agency Austria (Umweltbundesamt) has taken on the role to work with stakeholders and this is why this group has been involved in the project from the first days on. Future users were asked for their expectations and the terms of future use. Their responses were well taken into account when developing the decision support tool. “

“All Landsupport DSS are very useful to predict or manage the different issues that vineyard management poses. Especially in the organic viticulture the predictions really help to save product from fungal diseases. For long term planification the climatic and soil tools proved to be very useful.

When you are the first to understand what is going on, it means that you’ll be the best to solve a problem and the first to find the right solution. Before the DSS the only solution was preventing a potential problem by making hypotheses that very often were wrong; thanks to Landsupport DSS the hypothesis you make are nearly always right. That means saving money and time and being more precise.

Thanks to the climatic, soil and water tools you can do a better selection of different varieties to be planted in the area. It is easier to help the agronomic and oenological purpose go in the same direction.

The potential solar radiation is really helpful to give advice about the canopy management.”

“Within the LANDSUPPORT platform, I mainly use the “spatial planning” tools. LANDSUPPORT gives the unique opportunity to obtain an easy access to a huge amount of data and information, and to combine them.

For example, the tools on “Geospatial knowledge” and “Monitoring” allow a detailed description of a territory – a town or a region – based on the peculiarities of urban structure, environmental characteristics and recent urban growth trajectories. With the help of the cited tools, local planners can rapidly build a descriptive framework; moreover, there is the possibility to repeat the same analysis for a non-expert user (the platform is free and user-friendly), thus easing communication with stakeholders and non-expert audiences.

Beside the cited tools, a more expert public can use tools as “New urban development” and “New green corridor”, giving the possibility to simulate the impact of urban growth or transformation of urban areas into more natural landscapes, highlighting advantages and threats.

The usefulness of the LANDUPPORT platform comes from its characteristics. In fact the platform is open, easy to use, and user-friendly even for a non-expert audience; moreover, it gives the unique opportunity to make complex elaborations and simulations in short times, at a detailed scale (municipal or even smaller), for a considerable amount of countries.”

“Taking informed decisions requires access to the relevant data and information. An efficient decision support tool combines the available data with sophisticated modelling instruments in order to get useful indicators. The LANDSUPPORT DSS provides exactly this, at all decision making levels, from the local scale till up to the European scale.

Working at the European Commission we are often requested to provide the necessary data and indicators for the EU wide decision making process. LANDSUPPORT DSS can provide this evidence, like recently demonstrated for the land degradation tool.

Land degradation is a pervasive problem in the EU and needs to be urgently addressed. Achieving land degradation neutrality by 2030, as promised within goal 15 of the SDG’s, requires an efficient information basis for targeting our action. The LANDSUPPORT DSS tool for land degradation provides exactly this.”