LADSS or Land Allocation Decision Support System, is an agricultural land use planning tool being developed at The Macaulay Institute. It is implemented using the programming language G2 from Gensym alongside a Smallworld GIS application using the Magik programming language and an Oracle database. LADSS has recently been used to address climate change issues affecting agriculture in Scotland and Italy. Part of this work has involved the use of General Circulation Models (also known as Global climate models) to predict future climate scenarios. Other recent work has been a study into how Common Agricultural Policy reform will affect the uplands of Scotland, an assessment of agricultural sustainability and for rural development research within the AGRIGRID project. LADSS models crops using the CropSyst simulation model. LADSS also contains a livestock model plus social, environmental and economic impact assessments. Peer reviewed papers produced by LADSS are available for download in PDF format.
