Agriculture, Rural Development and Land-use Decision Support Systems
The international Erasmus+ project „Fostering Agriculture Rural Development and Land Management” (FARM) (agreement number: 2020-1-DE01-KA203-005688) is gaining momentum. The project started in 1st of November, 2020. For the time being, all project partner meetings are held remotely.
The project is coordinated by Lead Partner Harz University of Applied Sciences. One of the project partners is the Research Institute of Business and Rural Development of the Faculty of Bioeconomy Development of Agriculture Academy of Vytautas Magnus University. Actively involved Technical University of Cartagena (UPCT; Spain), University of Cyprus (UCY; Cyprus), Association for Internationalization of Education and Science (INTER-EDU; North Macedonia).
During the first meetings of the project, there was a lot of discussion about the decision support system (DSS), which can be any system that supports the decision-maker in making a decision, but it is primarily an information system that supports the decision-making activities of a business or organization. DSS helps to select and analyze large amounts of data by gathering detailed information that can be used to address agricultural, rural development and land management issues.
The decision is always a choice of many options, which should also include the option to do nothing. DSS performs many functions, so there are as many definitions as can be found articles and books on the subject. Decision support systems do not make decisions themselves, but help to make decisions, therefore their application requires specialists with certain qualifications.
During the discussions of the project partners, it was concluded that the main features of DSS are: it supports the decision-maker, but does not replace him; it supports all stages of the decision-making process; DSS user controlled; is usually an interactive and user-friendly tool developed by teams of researchers and practitioners.
Over the 26 months of the project, the partners plan to achieve four goals.
The first activity, which aims to identify, describe an interactive decision support system (DSS) in different countries in the fields of agriculture, rural development and land management and to produce an interactive map of decision support systems (DSS) for agriculture, rural development and land management, is being completed.
The second and third activities have been launched. Under the second project activity, it is planned to create an online ICT-based DSS tool catalog, which will be openly accessible and available on the project website – https://www.hs-harz.de/forschung/ausgewaehlte-forschungsprojekte/farm/, on the websites of the partner institutions. The project aim to promote DSS and ICT tools in agriculture, rural development and land management, to assist agricultural, rural development and land management decision-makers.
The result of this output is an online catalog of ICT and DSS tools that will be openly accessible and available on the project website and on the websites of the partner institutions
Under the third project activity, it is planned to develop 2 DSS prototypes that can be applied in the fields of agriculture, rural development and land management, after the need has been studied. The development of FARM DSS tools aims to enable the agri-food sector to assess, monitor and reduce the negative environmental impact of agricultural technological decisions and methods.
