Ecology and Development Series No. 10, 2003 - ZEF

Conservation of the wild Coffea arabica populations in situenvironmental education, recreation, ecotourism and research. The transition or cooperationzones may contain settlement areas, farms, and other human activities and are the areaswhere local communities, management agencies, scientists, non-governmental organizations,cultural groups, economic interests, and other stakeholders work together to manage andsustainably develop the area's resources.GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation methods have been successfully applied forsupporting management decisions that address different alternative solutions to spatialdecision making problems. The most common application of multi-criteria evaluationmethods is the identification of different land suitability classes for different uses (Eastman1999, Basnet et al. 2001). Recently, multi-criteria evaluation has also been used for mineralfavorability mapping (de Araujo and Macedo 2002), conservation of biodiversity and reservesite selection (Reyers et al. 2002), and protected areas zoning (Hepcan 2000).Zoning requires spatial decision-making by evaluating appropriate multiple criteriathat have spatial attributes. Spatial multi-criteria decision-making is an articulation of properobjectives and identification of attributes, which are useful indicators to achieve theseobjectives (Malczewski 1999). The biological evaluation criteria in forest reserve zoning fora coffee gene reserve can be layers of the extent of wild coffee populations and the diversityof plants species. Spatial representation of the evaluation criteria can be produced usingvegetation data from sample plots and respective data of environmental variables.Forest scientists and managers often use environmental conditions such as terrain,climate, and moisture to map the distribution of plant species and forest communities(Bolstad et al. 1998). The major environmental conditions that determine the distributionpatterns of plant species may change at macro- and meso-scales due to changes in latitudinaland continental/ oceanic influences on temperature and precipitation (Bailey 1996).However, the important environmental conditions at micro-level that determine plant speciesdistribution are mainly the soil moisture and temperature. These micro-level environmentalconditions are modified by variations in landform, elevation, slope and other terraincharacteristics (Bolstad et al. 1998). Hence, specific information about terrain may aid inpredicting the occurrence of species or plant communities at a given site, if there are strongrelationships between environmental conditions and species occurrences. Besides,environmental gradients identified by the ordination analysis such as the CCA and PCA axes100