Belgium-BoLa a specific sDSS to support land use planning in Flanders

The land units are the fundamental entities in the alphanumeric database, which is reflected by the fact that since all other entities are linked to land units. In BoLa, land units are defined by two land characteristics; i.e. initial land use type and soil association. For each of these land units the corresponding values are defined for the following ecosystem service attributes: (1) the soil suitability, (2) buffering capacity, (3) soil organic carbon stock, (4) susceptibility to soil compaction, (5) soil loss due to water- and cultivation erosion and (6) soil loss due to wind erosion. These attributes are used as the decision (or optimisation) criteria.

BoLa allows to perform land evaluation based on an absolute approach. This means that land quality or ES-levels are confronted with predefined requirements to classify land units through a threshold selection method. In this way, land units can be classified as recommendable or not recommendable for a given LUT, or alternatively, for a given land unit a distinction can be made between recommendable and not recommendable LUTs. On the other hand BoLa can perform land evaluation based on a relative approach. This approach leads to a further ranking of the selected land units or land use types.