Special Issue on Data and Scale Issues for SEA, E. João (Guest Editor) Spatial decision support for strategic environmental assessment of land use plans. A case study in southern Italy Davide Geneletti a, ⁎ , Stefano Bagli b , Paola Napolitano c,1 , Alberto Pistocchi b a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Trento, Via Mesiano, 77 38050 Trento, Italy b GECOsistema srl, viale G.Carducci, 15 47023 Cesena, Italy c Provincia di Napoli, via Don Bosco 4/F 80141 Napoli, Italy Available online 29 March 2007 Abstract This paper presents and discusses the construction of a spatial decision-support tool for the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of a land use plan: the spatial coordination plan of the Province of Naples, in southern Italy. The decision-support tool organises the relevant information, spatially resolves the actions of the plan, predicts their environmental impacts, and generates overall performance maps. Its final goal is to provide a suitable technical support to a formal SEA procedure. The expected implications of the plan, such as changes in land use and traffic flows and urban expansion, were modelled and assessed against a set of environmental criteria using SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis and mapping. It was found that the SWOT analysis provided a good basis for assessment and strategy formulation. The paper also intends to contribute to the topic of data and scale issues in SEA, by exemplifying the role played by spatial data and spatial analyses to support informative SEA. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Spatial indicators; SWOT mapping and analysis; Land use change; SEA; Data; Landscape scale Environmental Impact Assessment Review 27 (2007) 408 – 423 www.elsevier.com/locate/eiar ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: davide.geneletti@ing.unitn.it (D. Geneletti), home@gecosistema.it (S. Bagli), paola.napolitano@libero.it (P. Napolitano), home@gecosistema.it (A. Pistocchi). 1 Paola Napolitano is expressing her personal views, which do not necessarily reflect that of the Province of Naples. 0195-9255/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eiar.2007.02.005