ABSTRACT
The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers technical, financial, and educational support to farm and ranch operators through a diverse set of conservation programs designed to lessen environmental and natural resource problems caused by agricultural activities. Numerous internal and external program assessments point to inconsistencies in the application selection processes of these programs, the end result of which is the inefficient distribution of several billion dollars of scarce federal funds and missed environmental and natural resource program goals. Spatial Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (SMCDA) is particularly suitable for federal conservation programs where location matters and recommendations call for a more disciplined and transparent process to reduce questions about each program’s implementation and effectiveness. ArcGIS ModelBuilder is an extremely useful application that program managers can use to make their SMCDA models operational, understand likely impacts of their models prior to implementation, manage programs, and modify their models as programs change. The goals of our research were to
11.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 190 11.2 Methods ........................................................................................................ 191 11.3 Results and Discussion ................................................................................. 196
11.3.1 Weighting Analyses .......................................................................... 196 11.3.2 Decision Rules Analysis ................................................................... 197
11.4 GIS Application ............................................................................................200 11.5 Summary ...................................................................................................... 201 References ..............................................................................................................202
