Mchich Derak & Jordi Cortina-Segarra

Course on practical application of Spatial Multicriteria Analysis in natural resource management, with a special emphasis on the identification of critical areas for restoration.

Ecological restoration is a suitable tool to revert land degradation and enhance human well-being. A major challenge in systematic restoration planning is the identification of critical areas where restoration should be prioritized to optimize the use of time and resources. The identification of critical areas is a complex decision-making problem that requires the integration of multiple criteria from different disciplines. Spatial multicriteria analysis (SMCA) allows dealing with such complexity, given its ability to combine different types of spatial data, and incorporate the opinion of different social groups in the decision-making process.

Practical application of SMCA requires a special attention to a number of issues: construction of the decision matrix, use of weighting methods appropriate for a wide range of social groups, computation of global maps, aggregation and interpretation of collective preferences, among others. The Integrated Land and Water Information System (ILWIS), a PC-based GIS and remote sensing software, has been widely used to implement SMCA in an easy and comprehensive way. Handling this software allows practitioners to deal with SMCA problems in an efficient way.

During the course, participants will be given an overview on restoration prioritizing tools as well as on SMCA applied to natural resource management. Participants will perform SMCA exercises using ILWIS. Furthermore, participants will be given practical advices to interpret SMCA outputs and the way to validate them taking into consideration social needs and interests.

At the end of the course, participants will have acquired practical abilities:

• To use suitable SMCA methods to prioritize restoration interventions.
• To avoid typical errors when performing successive SMCA steps.
• To compute and compare global priority maps for individuals and different societal groups.
• To collectively interpret and validate SMCA outputs.

8:30 - 11:30

13:30 - 16:30