The Automated Land Evaluation System, or ALES (pronounced in English as "'ay-less", rhymes with "pay less"), is a computer program that allows land evaluators to build expert systems to evaluate land according to the method presented in the Food and Agriculture Organization's "Framework for Land Evaluation" (1976) and subsequent Guidelines, as explained in the program's background. It is intended for use in project or regional scale land evaluation.
ALES was developed at Cornell University from 1986-1996 under the direction of Professor Armand Van Wambeke; in 1997 program author D G Rossiter moved to ITC Enschede in the Netherlands, and in 2014 back to Cornell. Although ALES is a DOS program which has not been updated since 1996, it is still a rich expert-system environment and continues in use as part of the land evaluator's toolkit. As long as you want to use it, I will support it.
Colleagues in Bolivia are developing a Spanish-language Windows version of ALES.
Last modified: Mon Mar 23 09:43:12 EDT 2020