Jun Wang Project

Jun (Judy) Wang, PhD candidate
Nanjing University
gis_wang@hotmail.com

Ms. Wang is a doctoral student in the School of Geography and Ocean Science at Nanjing University, China. A brief description of her project follows:

Design and develop a land-use decision support system utilizing knowledge-base technology and GIS for the Grain for Green Project of China

Over the past several decades, China’s environments have degraded and deteriorated severely due to increasing population pressure and escalating economic growth. It is now widely recognized that the long term destruction of ecological environments in China has caused natural disasters such as floods and droughts to become more frequent and widespread, and in turn contributed to rural poverty in disaster areas, resulting in further damages to regional and national social and economic developments.

China currently has one of the world’s most ambitious reforestation and afforestation programs, known as Grain for Green. This program has been in place since 1999 and will last 10 years, with the goal of reducing soil erosion by converting steep-sloping agricultural and barren land to forest
land. Grain for Green program is also a land use and land use change program and needs reasonable land use decision-making by both of scientists and regional governments. Efficient techniques, methods, software and decision support system are required for selecting degraded land on steep slopes which should be converted to forests upon the evaluation of the potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts.

With the development of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Decision Support System (DSS), the concept of Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) and its application gained considerable interest in recent years. There is increasing interest in the use of SDSS in China (e.g. SDSS-based Shanghai flood control decision support system and development of intelligent spatial decision support system and application in intensive forest farm).
SDSS often solve ill-structure problems based on integrating expert knowledge or expertise in land use allocation and evaluation domain.

Fuzzy logic and methodology of knowledge-based approximate reasoning are suitable for land use change assessment and land-use decision-making problems which need consideration of numerous issues and factors. And Netweaver is outstanding software which appeared in literatures of watershed assessments and ecosystem evaluations and will play a fundamental role in my work.

The goal of my research project is to design a framework and develop a SDSS based on GIS and knowledge base for Grain for Green project of China.

Different demands need different factors and criteria. I want to formulize the factors’ fuzzy function upon investigation on the guideline of Grain for Green and some experts’ knowledge in this domain and model knowledge base for the construction of my SDSS.

Though this project is in the starting research phase without any
government financial support now I have the confidence with my research work and will seek the opportunity of cooperating with local government or forest service after a common decision support tool achievement, thus let more scholars and officials of China get to know NetWeaver.