A Spatial Decision Support System Framework for Climate Change Adaptation in Victoria

Climate Change has been acknowledged as one of the single greatest threats to global social, environmental and economic wellbeing. Climate change poses significant threats to existing urban infrastructure, current water use practices and agricultural industries to name a few. In the State of Victoria in Australia, there is an e-Science initiative to mobilise cross-organisational expertise in order to underpin policy-making as it relates to climate change adaptation. An underpinning Spatial Decision Support System Framework has been designed to support integrated systems modelling across a number of modelling domains including climate, hydrological, crop and land suitability modelling. A number of core datasets serve as inputs in the spatial decision support system framework including land utilization, soil, geology, climate prediction (historical and forecasts) and many others. These datasets feed into a number of system models, which are used to better understand the present and future land suitability, hydrological processes, agricultural productivity and sea level changes. The climate change models align with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios and have been downscaled to a regional level. In this research we present an e-Science based virtual collaborative workspace which has been developed to support the exchange of data, models, within a secure crossorganisational data grid. Also, we examine the use of a geographical visualisation as a front end to complex multi-disciplinary scenario modelling to enable end users to better understand the policy and on the ground implications of climate change to the Victorian landscape.