Evidential reasoning for assessing environmental impact

Many problems in the areas of environmental monitoring and assessment, site selection and planning, land use management, and natural resources allocation are characterized by the need to consider subjective judgement and uncertain data. Many of these problems are also spatial in nature. This research proposes a formal methodology for integrating subjective inferential reasoning and geographic information systems (GIS) into a decision support system for use in these problem domains. The rationale for inferential spatial models, and the structure and function of a spatial modeling environment based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence are presented.