Exploratory GIS analysis via spatially weighted regression trees

The challenging goal of the Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security (MAGIC) project is to quantitatively enlighten the nexus among energy, food, water and land use toward informed governance inside EU aimed at long term environmental feasibility, economic viability and social desirability. Within the framework of recursive partitioning algorithms by tree-based methods, this paper provides an application on a real Geographic Information System (GIS) dataset regarding the irrigation communities in Almeria, Spain. We propose to build an explorative regression tree – spatially weighted – aiming at classifying the specific consumption of water (per hectare) of the farming communities based on either water management areas and different mix of sources for irrigation water (surface, groundwater, waste water, desalination).