Geo-informatic Web-based Applications for Olive Oil Mills’ Wastes Disposal Areas Management

LIFE+ project “Strategies to improve and protect soil quality from the disposal of olive oil mills’ wastes (OOMW) in the Mediterranean PROSODOL”, aims towards the development and application of technologies for the protection, improvement and remediation of soils which are polluted from the disposal of OOMW. In this effort, two major geospatial web-based application tools were developed and implemented aiming to the effective monitoring of soil quality and wastes disposal areas management. Soil parameters were mapped with respect to the depth, date and temporal variations of their spatial distribution (spatial surfaces). Furthermore, the diffusion of these parameters in the subsurface was also studied. Interpolated surfaces based on the Inverse Distance Weighted method (IDW) were created and integrated within a geospatial web based map application tool. On the other hand, anthropogenic, environmental and geological features in the vicinity of all OOMW disposal sites of one of the main areas of interest (former municipality of Nikiforos Fokas and in extent the prefecture of Rethymno, Greece) were used for evaluating the local risk imposed by the location of the particular facilities. In order to assess the appropriateness of the location of these facilities a range of multicriteria problem solving techniques, such as the Weighted Sum Model (WSM) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods, were applied in prefecture of Rethymno area for the risk assessment modeling of the OOMW disposal areas. A second web based map application tool was implemented for evaluating the location suitability of the OOMW disposal areas and further the olive oil production facilities depending on several anthropogenic, environmental and geological criteria. Different scenarios were tested by weighting accordingly all these features giving evaluation suitability maps for each of the underlying risk assessment modeling techniques.