Design and Implementation of a Web-Based Collaborative Spatial Decision Support System: Organizational and Managerial Implications

The development of collaborative spatial decision support systems presents a host of challenges, ranging from technical to societal and institutional. Resource managers and environmental planners often need to understand the effect of the distributed and uncoordinated land management practices of individual decision-makers, which in the long run causes significant environmental impact. In many cases environmental planning requires collaborative decision-making tools where complex interacting agents with conflicting goals need to work without any prior idea of the counterpart. This paper identifies research issues on the design and implementation of a Web-based collaborative spatial decision making in the specific context of distributed environmental planning. We demonstrate a Web-based Spatial Decision Support System GEO-ELCA Exploratory Land Use Change Assessment for typical decision-making tasks by urban or municipal planning agencies where resource managers or stakeholders of different interest groups can express their options for future land use changes and assess the resulting hydrological impacts in a collaborative environment.