Importance of web-based decision support system for site-specific land use planning: A comprehensive review analysis

Abstract

Traditional agriculture faces immense challenges, including resource depletion, environmental degradation, and climate change. Sustainable agriculture offers a solution, but farmers often lack access to readily available, tailored information to implement these practices effectively. The Decision Support System (DSS) provides an ideal platform for integration of information on natural resources with ancillary and legacy information to arrive at decisions related to development of land and water resources, site specific land management practices for conservation and rehabilitations, sustainable land use for specific purpose on sustainable basis. GIS based DSS can analyse a wider range of agricultural related resources such as soil, weather, hydrology, various socio-economic variables simultaneously and accurately. It helps for examination of different variables in a GIS environment leads to a better understanding of how agricultural systems function and interact over space and time. These tools improve the performance of decision makers while reducing the time and human resources required for analysing complex decisions for sustainable management (Reddy and Rao, 1995). Decision Support Systems (DSS) are "interactive computer-based systems that help decision makers to utilize data and models to solve unstructured problems" (Turban, 1995). DSS is a computing system which uses organized knowledge about a specific field to display and interact with the facts and figures and solves a problem (Brajendra et al., 2017). A web-based decision support system (DSS) can bridge this gap, empowering farmers to make informed, sustainable choices. This paper explores the concept of a web-based DSS for sustainable agriculture, highlighting its potential benefits, key functionalities, and challenges in development and implementation. DSS helps to site specific nutrient management, site specific selection of crop and variety as per soil site suitability, capability and irrigability it helps to sustainable land use for sustainable crop yield and doubling farmer income.