Wood-fuel landscape sustainability assessment: a combination of fuzzy logic and principal components analysis

Abstract

This paper explores the use of a fuzzy logic values-based landscape evaluation to support the sustainable landscape institutional and political decision-making process. The approach taken in this study accepts that landscape value is identified from a composition of socio-cultural, ecological and economic value outcomes, where socio-cultural interaction with the natural world places structure and components in to the landscape in the pursuit of physical and mental well-being. The subsequent combination of structure and component is characterised by consequent ecological and economic conditions. Differences in these components and the associated structures that are created produce different value outcomes. These outcomes are captured and used to describe the multi-dimensional nature of the value relationship community holds with its surrounding landscape. Adopting an approach that accepts incommensurability, and rejects the permutability of all 'values', leaving behind the need for monetary-based communication, the informative nature inherent within the individual expressions of value can be expressed.