On 30 May 2018, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) participated in the LANDSUPPORT kick off meeting, the first face-to-face event that depicted the official start of the project. The project partners, an international and complementary group of research centres, small/medium enterprises (SMEs) and policy makers, aim to develop an integrated web-based decision support system for the implementation of agricultural and environmental policies.
The LANDSUPPORT research project envisages an open and freely accessible decision support system that enables the evaluation of trade-offs between land uses to support the development of sustainable agriculture, forestry and environmental policies and practices. It will include a combination of user-friendly tools to help determine the impact of land use decisions at multiple scales, through data collection, integration, modelling and analysis.
BSC will contribute to LANDSUPPORT with the in-house programming model COMPSs, a task-based programming model environment, with the objective of offering a parallelization platform for the different modelling algorithms used in the LANDSUPPORT platform. Additionally, COMPSs will be integrated with Rasdaman, an advanced database that allows storing and querying massive multi-dimensional arrays, such as sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data proceeding from domains such as earth, space, and life sciences.
"LANDSUPPORT is a great opportunity for BSC to start research activities in the area of sustainable agriculture and forestry. COMPSs will be used to coordinate the different models that evaluate the trade-off between land uses, which will have an impact on European land policies," says Rosa M. Badia, group manager of Workflows and Distributed Computing at BSC and BSC coordinator of the LANDSUPPORT project.
The main innovation of LANDSUPPORT is that it aims to integrate decisions at many geographical scales in one toolset, enabling the alignment of agricultural and environmental sustainability policy ambitions with local operational realities, which are often neglected. To demonstrate this concept, LANDSUPPORT will run test cases at four geographic scales: EU, National (Italy, Hungary, Austria), Regional (an Italian and Hungarian region) and local (pilot sites in Austria, Italy, Hungary, Tunisia and Malaysia).