Publications

Numerous efforts around the world are underway to apply the Montreal criteria and indicators to assess the sustainability of temperate and boreal forests. In this paper, we describe a logic-based system for evaluating the sustainability of forests at regional and national levels. We believe that such a system can make evaluation of sustainability more consistent and transparent. This effort also makes two points abundantly clear: (1) a systematic way to organize expert judgment about ecological, economic, social and institutional relationships (here, using [`]fuzzy logic') is crucial to building such a system and (2) that the structure of this logic-based system reflects a policy framework and a series of decisions about values and what is meant by [`]sustainability'

The USDA Forest Service and Environmental Protection Agency have cooperatively developed a knowledge base for assessment and monitoring of ecological states and processes in sixth-code watersheds. The knowledge base provides a formal logical specification for evaluating watershed processes, patterns, general effects of human influence, and specific effects on salmon habitat. The knowledge base was designed in the NetWeaver knowledge base development system and evaluated in the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system. EMDS is an application framework for knowledge-based decision support of ecological landscape analysis at any geographic scale. The system integrates geographic information system and knowledge base system technologies to provide an analytical tool for environmental assessment and monitoring. The basic objective of EMDS is to improve the quality and completeness of environmental assessments and the efficiency with which they are performed. This paper presents an overview of the NetWeaver and EMDS systems, describes the general structure of the knowledge base for watershed assessment, and presents a small example of its use for evaluating erosion processes

This chapter presents a management perspective on decision support for ecosystem management.The Introduction provides a brief historical over- view of decision support technology as it has been used in natural resource management, discusses the role of decision support in ecosystem management as we see it, and summarizes the current state of the technology. The Decision-making Process exan-dnes the seven- step process as described in the companion science paper (Oliver and Twery, this volume). At each step, there are issues, concerns, and pitfalls to be considered. This section is also, in effect, a key to software tools and systems discussed later in the chapter, because we dis- cuss how specific tools, and to a lesser extent systems, can usefully contribute to the decision process. Decision Support Tools provides a brief introduc- tion to a wide variety of software tools that are po- tentiauy valuable as aids to a decision process. Some of these tools will be relatively familiar to readers. How- ever, we expect that many readers will have had little or no exposure to a number of these tools, so moti- vating examples are liberally used to suggest how and why specific tools may be useful. Discussion in this section has been kept as nontechnical as possible. Knowledge Based Systems provides an overview of an important, and relatively new, decision support technology that is particularly valuable for handling problems that do not readily tend themselves to neat algorithmic solutions. Frequently, for example, we do not understand a problem precisely enough to develop a numerical solution. Nevertheless, enough of the problem may be understood that professionals with years of experience in the problem domain can reason about it intelligently and offer useful solutions. Promising Possibilities picks up on the theme of where decision support technology is today from the Introduction, and speculates about what we might expect to see in the near future.