Assessing coastal sustainability: a Bayesian approach for modeling and estimating a global index for measuring risk

Integrated Coastal Zone Management is an emerging research area. The aim is to provide a global view of different and heterogeneous aspects interacting in a geographical area. Decision Support Systems, integrating Computational Intelligence methods, can be successfully used to estimate useful anthropic and environmental indexes. Bayesian Networks have been widely used in the environmental science domain. In this paper a Bayesian model for estimating the Sustainable Coastal Index is presented. The designed Bayesian Network consists of 17 nodes, hierarchically organized in 4 layers. The first layer is initialized with the season and the physiographic region information. In the second layer, the first-order indexes, depending on raw data, of physiographic regions are computed. The third layer estimates the second-order indexes of the analyzed physiographic regions. In the fourth layer, the global Sustainable Coastal Index is inferred. Processed data refers to 13 physiographic regions in the Province of Trapani, western Sicily, Italy. Gathered data describes the environmental information, the agricultural, fisheries, and economical behaviors of the local population and land. The Bayesian Network was trained and tested using a real dataset acquired between 2000 and 2006. The developed system presents interesting results.