Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision, its rationality, and the resulting optimal decision. These decisions are difficult because the complexity of the system or because of determining the optimal situation or behaviour. This work will illustrate how MCDA is applied in practice to a complex problem to resolve such us soil erosion and degradation. Desertification is a global problem and recently it has been studied in several forums as ONU that literally says: <i>"Desertification has a very high incidence in the environmental and food security, socioeconomic stability and world sustained development"</i>. Desertification is the soil quality loss and one of FAO's most important preoccupations as hunger in the world is increasing. Multiple factors are involved of diverse nature related to: natural phenomena (water and wind erosion), human activities linked to soil and water management, and others not related to the former. In the whole world this problem exists, but its effects and solutions are different. It is necessary to take into account economical, environmental, cultural and sociological criteria. A multi-criteria model to select among different alternatives to prepare an integral plan to ameliorate or/and solve this problem in each area has been elaborated taking in account eight criteria and five alternatives. Six sub zones have been established following previous studies and in each one the initial matrix and weights have been defined to apply on different criteria. Three multicriteria decision methods have been used for the different sub zones: ELECTRE, PROMETHEE and AHP. The results show a high level of consistency among the three different multicriteria methods despite the complexity of the system studied. The methods are fully described for La Estrella sub zone, indicating election of weights, Initial Matrixes, algorithms used for PROMETHEE, and the Graph of Expert Choice showing the AHP results. A brief schema of the actions recommended for each of the six different sub zones is discussed
Abstract.We use multifractal analysis to estimate the Rényi dimensions of river basins by two different partition methods. These methods differ in the way that the Euclidian plane support of the measure is covered, partitioning it by using mutually exclusive boxes or by gliding a box over the plane.Images of two different drainage basins, for the Ebro and Tajo rivers, located in Spain, were digitalized with a resolution of 0.5 km, giving image sizes of 617×1059 pixels and 515×1059, respectively. Box sizes were chosen as powers of 2, ranging from 2×4 pixels to 512×1024 pixels located within the image, with the purpose of covering the entire network. The resulting measures were plotted versus the logarithmic value of the box area instead of the box size length.Multifractal Analysis (MFA) using a box counting algorithm was carried out according to the method of moments ranging from −5
Abstract. With the advent of modern non-destructive tomography techniques, there have been many attempts to analyze 3-D pore space features mainly concentrating on soil structure. This analysis opens a challenging opportunity to develop techniques for quantifying and describe pore space properties, one of them being fractal analysis.Undisturbed soil samples were collected from four horizons of Brazilian soil and 3-D images at 45 µm resolution. Four different threshold criteria were used to transform computed tomography (CT) grey-scale imagery into binary imagery (pore/solid) to estimate their mass fractal dimension (D m ) and entropy dimension (D 1 ). Each threshold criteria had a direct influence on the porosity obtained, varying from 8 to 24% in one of the samples, and on the fractal dimensions. Linear scaling was observed over all the cube sizes, however depending on the range of cube sizes used in the analysis, D m could vary from 3.00 to 2.20, realizing that the threshold influenced mainly the scaling in the smallest cubes (length of size from 1 to 16 voxels).D m and D 1 showed a logarithmic relation with the apparent porosity in the image, however, the increase of both values respect to porosity defined a characteristic feature for each horizon that can be related to soil texture and depth.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.