The objective of this work was to develop a decision support system to recommend land use and practices for soil conservation and management, which integrates an Expert System, Geographic Information System (GIS), a database and an interface to monitor input and output data and the messages passed between the subsystems. Using soil and slope maps, the developed system determines land capability from information stored in the database and also supplied by SIG; it recommends adequate uses for land capability class as well as practices for soil conservation and management and identifies conflict areas comparing the maps of land use with the land capability. All results can be visualized by the user through windows of the program, recorded or printed in form of report. In order to test the system, the municipality of Santo Antônio do Jardim, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, was selected. The system is a powerful and efficient tool, permitting the evaluation of a region and thereby offering support for adequate decision making.
expert system; geographic information system; land capability; soil conservation
