Decision Support Tools

Decision-making capabilities (knowledge application) in land management have been challenged to meet more objectives and to satisfy a greater diversity of clientele needs. As natural resource management moves from a difficult multiple-resource management paradigm to an even more difficult ecosystem management paradigm (which focuses on mutually sustainable social, economic, and biophysical systems), the need for better and more powerful decision support aids becomes urgent. Developing the theory and practice of how to use information technology to support effective knowledge management and application is one of the most important challenges facing systems science today. Without it, managers are ill-prepared to deal with overwhelming forest resource data/information, and are limited in the use of that information to make wise resource management decisions.

The following pages review how information technology can be used to support decision making and the application of scientific knowledge in natural resource management. Most formal knowledge is represented symbolically for one of three purposes: descriptive (characterize the state of the world), predictive (envision future states of the world), and prescriptive (mandate/achieve future states of the world). Most knowledge management and application systems for natural resource management contain aspects of each of these, focusing primarily on prescriptive knowledge. Two particular natural resource management decision support systems are used as examples—the Ecosystem Management Decision Support System (EMDS) and NED (a Decision Support System for Natural Resource Management).

• Introduction to Decision Support
• Knowledge Representation and Management
• A Comparison of Existing Ecosystem Management DSS
• Assessing Watershed Conditions with EMDS
• Managing Bent Creek Experimental Forest Using NED
• BROKEN-LINK BROKEN-LINK Ecosystem Management and the Southern Appalachian National Forests
• Summary and Conclusions