PNW Station announces release of EMDS version 5.0

The Pacific Northwest Research Station, in collaboration with the private, non-profit EMDS Consortium, announces release of version 5.0 of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system. EMDS is a spatial decision-support framework for environmental analysis and planning that brings logic processing and multi-criteria decision analysis to integrated, multi-scale spatial decision support. At version 5.0, EMDS has been completely re-engineered and optimized, resulting in more than 10-fold improvements in processing speed and database handling capacity. In addition, the new version provides improved interfaces for viewing and customizing map products, and producing and comparing multiple alternative scenarios that let users explore changes to data and models. Lastly, EMDS 5.0 lays essential groundwork for integrating extremely powerful new tools to the framework over the next few years, including support for designing and implementing workflows so users can extend the functionality of the system or automate complex geoprocessing sequences, and introduction of provenance tracking which will provide comprehensive documentation of project development as well as support backtracking and branching in complex analytical sequences. EMDS is currently being used by the USDA Forest Service as the primary system to support implementation of the Terrestrial Condition Assessment. The software is available at http://emds.mountain-viewgroup.com/.