5. Discussion and conclusions
The undertaken research has proposed the development of a Multicriteria-Spatial Decision Support System to assess the land suitability to behave as an ecological corridor, in order to generate, at the same time, a rich understanding of the specificity and complexity of the case under analysis and to provide a framework for analyzing the potentialities and the limits of combining the Analytic Network Process and GIS in a MC-SDSS model. The proposed methodology has been illustrated with reference to the case study of the Piedmont Region (Northern Italy) in order to highlight potential ecological corridors and stepping stones and thus provide a useful support for planning ecological networks.
The experimentation was carried out as a research study with the intention to test the usefulness of the proposed methodology in the landscape ecology field for the preliminary strategic planning phase.
The use of the OWA method allows several decision scenarios to be evaluated in order to guide planners to reach the most satisfactory solution taking into account both risk and trade-off measures involved in the decision-making process.
The results derived from the study demonstrate that the aim of the approach is not to find a single optimal solution, but to show other strengths associated with the weighting flexibility of the OWA approach.