Expert judgement of mutual influence among land degradation determination criteria
2017
Platonova, D., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia) | Parsova, V., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia) | Jankava, A., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia) | Berzina, M., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia)
Land is a non-renewable resource with limited availability and, therefore, a very important issue is the preservation of useful properties of land and comprehensive and sustainable land use. The process of land and soil degradation (decline of properties) leading to the formation of degraded land have been observed due to the influence of various economic activities and environmental conditions. The Land Management Law has already specified that degraded land is an area of destroyed or damaged land surface or abandoned territory of building sites, mineral extraction, economic or military activity. The expert opinion on degraded land is that it could be a polluted area, abandoned building sites, old greenhouse territories, Soviet-period farms and workshops, as well as non-recultivated mineral deposit sites and dumping grounds. The research concluded that currently it is useful to distinguish three types of degraded land: abandoned building sites, an abandoned mineral extraction area and an abandoned agricultural and forestry activity area. The Analytic Hierarchy Process developed by American mathematician T.L.Saaty was applied for choosing criteria for each type of degraded land to identify the views of experts on the mutual influence of land degradation determination criteria. The results of the expert evaluations showed that the most important criteria for the determination of abandoned building sites and agricultural and forestry activities were “dump-site” and “abandoned military territory or object”.
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