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Spain-An agro-ecological Decision Support Systems for evaluting soil under scenarios of global change +	MicroLEIS DSS predicts the optimum land use and the best soil management practices, personalized for each soil type, in order to get the optimum biomass productivity, minimum environmental vulnerability and maximum CO2 sequestration while considering climate change scenarios all together with other important global change elements, such as land use change, desertification, agricultural extensification/intensification, etc. MicroLEIS DSS consists of three interactive data bases for soil, climate and management and 12 evaluation models that evaluate soil capability and vulnerability under current scenario and future scenario of global change. MicroLEIS DSS has over 5000 users worldwide. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is the legal owner of the MicroLEIS DSS Technology registered under application number 200899900514357 and submitted on the 2nd of June, 2008 to the Delegate Office of the Intellectual Property Registry in Seville, Spain. The tool was developed by the Soil Evaluation Research Group under the leadership of Research Professor, Diego de la Rosa Acosta, of the Soil-Plant-Water Protection Department belonging to the CSIC’s Institute of Natural Resources and Agro-Biology in Seville. On the 2nd of February, 2009, CSIC and Evenor-Tech signed a License Contract by which CSIC grants Evenor-Tech the exclusive rights to exploit and develop the MicroLEIS System. Case study: To reverse the negative environmental impacts of agriculture, a land evaluation decision support system (DSS) known as MicroLEIS-DSS was used to design the most sustainable land use and management practices for selected Mediterranean benchmark sites in Sevilla Province, Southern Spain. The predicted results of applying the 12 agro-ecological land evaluation model constituents of MicroLEIS DSS are presented and discussed at De la Rosa, et al, 2009. The main conclusion of this paper is that using soil type information in decision-making is at the heart for sustainable use and management of agricultural land. This agro-ecological approach can be especially useful when formulating soil-specific agricultural practices to reverse environmental degradation, based on the spatial variability of soils and related resources.  +
Spain-Sustainable Management of Mediterranean Forest: Valencian Community Case +	The Mediterranean forest is one of the most vulnerable ecosystems and is one which plays an essential role as a regulating element of water resources and climate change, as well as minimizing the advance of erosion and biodiversity loss. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies which deal with decision making at a regional level that include stakeholders´ participation as a general framework for small scale planning, such as municipal or protected natural parks, as well as to design public policies. The objective of this case is to develop an empirical model for the sustainable forest management at a regional level of the Mediterranean forest that takes public participation into account as well as the relevant objectives, integrating both aspects to inform public policies, using several Multiple Criteria Decision Making approaches. The Valencian Community is located on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. It is an Autonomous Region of the Spanish State with its own authority for strategic forest management. Nowadays, the relevance of the Mediterranean forest is mainly due to the services that it provides and not to the traditional production of wood and cattle where its productivity is very low when compared with the Atlantic forest, characteristic of the North of Spain and Europe. The Valencian forest surface, covers almost 60% of the territory, but contributes barely to 0.03% of the GNP. The Valencian Community has a total forest area of 1,323,465 hectares and 4.5 million people, a population density higher than the European Union average. We can summarize the methodology we have used as follows. Firstly, we proposed a decision hierarchy with the sustainable management of a Mediterranean forest as the decision goal at the first level. The second level consists of social, economic, and environmental criteria, the three basic pillars of the sustainability concept as well as the multifunctional forest. Each of these criteria is divided into specific objectives in the third level with enough detail to include all aspects which are currently relevant to the Valencian region. We have completed a decision hierarchy considering several management strategies taking into account those which are being applied by public administration as well as others proposed by experts. Secondly, we identified Mediterranean forest stakeholders and we carried out a Workshop with representatives of these stakeholders to test the criteria, objectives and strategies previously proposed. In this workshop, with almost 200 participants, we carried out a round table with the stakeholder’s representatives (Administration, Professional Engineering Associations, people involved in Forest Research and Education, Hunting and Fishing Federations, Forest Owners -private owners and municipalities-, Companies and Land Stewardship, Environmentalist and Conservationist Groups), followed by a colloquium and general debate between all participants. Representatives of these groups are the ones usually invited by the Regional Government to collaborate in developing new forest programmes in the Valencian Community. Group participation with knowledgeable people is a good way to ensure that the decision hierarchy is a logical and complete structure. After that we carried out a survey amongst the stakeholders to determine their criteria and objective preferences using Saaty´s scale. Contribution of strategies to objectives was established with a later survey amongst experts.  +
Sweden-The development and introduction of versatile DSS in Sweden +	Computerized decision support system has a long history in Sweden although until recently dominated by just a few systems (mainly the FMPP and Hugin). As forest policies and management objectives changed in the 1990's the need of a next generation of analysis and planning system was recognised of several stakeholders. Funded partly by the forestry and environmental sectors a new one, the Heureka system (Wikström et al. 2011) was developed in 2002 - 2009 in a multi-disciplinary research programme at SLU and the Forestry Research Institute of Sweden (Skogforsk) (Lämås and Eriksson 2003, Anon. 2009). It includes a number of software for different users and problem areas, the main software being StandWise, an interactive stand simulator, PlanWise for long and short term planning on forest holdings, and RegWise for regional analysis. These software are built on a common core of central models describing (individual) tree and stand development. As former systems were outdated also concerning system architecture programming languages,etc., all Heureka software are built from scratch within the above mentioned research programme (programming language C#, development environment .NET, programmers employed by SLU as well as consultants) except for a GIS-based habitat model tool. PlanWise is the one that probably will be most frequently used and the one proposed for a FORSYS case study. It has a module for strategic planning as well as a module for subsequent tactical planning. The horizon in the first case is typically 100+ years (set by the user), five year time steps. The horizon and time step in the tactical planning is set by the user, typically 2 - 5 year horizon, 1 year time step. The inclusion of the two planning problems of different time scales is motivated by basically similar problem formulation - though for different time horizons - and solving technique. So far the single spatial with neighborhood relation problem handled is opening size constraints (clear felled areas). The treatment unit are typically stands, either all stands in the analysis area (“full spatial coverage”) or a (stratified) sample of stands where the sample stands have been surveyed by sample plots. The latter approach is typically used for strategic planning on large forest holdings. It can also operate on sample plots from the National Forest Inventory (NFI). That is, it can be used on small and large forest holdings, arbitrary landscapes using the “kNN Sweden” forestry map up to regions using NFI data. The first version of the Heureka system was released in autumn 2009. PlanWise is used in research projects, teaching, in practical forestry and has also been used by authorities (County Boards for landscape analysis). The former FMPP was widely used by large Swedish forest companies. PlanWise is now replacing that system as, for example, Bergvik Skog AB in 2011 elaborated strategic plans for their 1.8 million ha holding using PlanWise. PlanWise has also showed a large potential for planning on medium sized forest holdings. Moreover, the Federation of Swedish Family Forest Owners uses the Heureka core models (by DLLs) for projection of stand development in their recently developed system for producing forest management plans. Heureka is now maintained and further developed at the Forest Sustainability Analysis unit at SLU  +
Sweden-The history of a successfull forest DSS in Sweden +	In an international parspective the FMPP (Jonsson et al. 1993)is unique as it include software as well as hardware (innovations and development of field survey equipment) for the entire process and data flow starting with selection of a sample followed by a field inventory, calculation of initial state, projection of a set of alternavative management alternatives for each sample stand and optimization for finding preferred forest holding level management alternatives. A stratified PPS sample (stand size as the size variable, the forest holding stand register making up the sampling frame) is very efficient for large populations and thereby the approach was cost efficient for large forest holdings. In Sweden it brought about a paradimgm shift in forest management planning, maybe most of all as economics - not just cubic meters and hectars - was explicitly included in the analyses. Another corner stone were the stand - the actual treatment unit - as a sampling unit and base for the analysis contrary to individual sample plots in former systems. The system was designed and built by a small research group in the 1980's at SLU but got widely used by large forest companies in Sweden for 30 years. Large forest companies perform strategic planning procedures in 5 - 10 years interval. It was striking, though, that few persons had deep system knowledge. Moreover, in the last decade ownership and responsibilities have been unclear. Some experience from the use and application of the system is described by Jacobsson et al. (1991) The success factors - how come that it was so widely used for such a long time period? - has yet to be analyzed and documented.  +
SØK +	SØK includes a graphical user interface where the user can simulate different stand level decisions. The user can choose between a range of tree species, site qualities, assortment distributions, update price and cost information, and calculate the resulting growth and yield as well as income, regeneration costs, and net present value.  +
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T(ree) +	T is a forest simulator developed from biological as well as economic sub models for individual trees. T is designed to simulate alternative treatment schedules for all compartments in a planning area.  +
TAURON +	TAURON develops tactical 10 years and annual plans. The system includes growth and yield simulations, regeneration models, area and economic budget models and is linked to the LANDINFO information management system.  +
TerEval +	TAURON develops tactical 10 years and annual plans. The system includes growth and yield simulations, regeneration models, area and economic budget models and is linked to the LANDINFO information management system.  +
The Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management (IGN) +	The Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management (IGN) is a broadly based department at the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen. IGN’s activities include research and development, BSc and MSc courses and adult education/continuity training, servicing the public sector, innovation, monitoring, consultancy and outreach as well as international development and environmental assistance.  +
ToSIA +	ToSIA has been developed by EFI since 2006.  +
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United States-The forest plan revision process in the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest +	The establishment of national forests in United States (US) was begun in 1891 through the American Land Revision Act. The US Forest Service was established in 1905 and took over management of what has become known as the National Forest System (NFS). The NFS is the whole of the forest and woodland areas owned by the federal government and managed by the United States (US) Forest Service. Today in the United States there are 155 National Forests, and 16 National Forests are included in the Pacific Northwest region of the USDA Forest Service. The management of National Forests in United States is guided by (USDA Forest Service PNWR, 2011): strategic goals of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and USDA Forest Service (restore, sustain, and enhance the nation's forests and grassland; sustain and enhance outdoor recreation opportunities; provide science-based applications and tools for sustainable natural resources, etc.); laws (Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act -RPA- issued in 1974; National Forest Management Act -NFMA- issued in 1976; National Environmental Policy Act issued in 1979); regulations (first planning regulations for NFMA in 1979, revision of NFMA planning regulations in 1982 and 2012); agency policies. Each national forest is required to have a strategic plan (“national forest plan”, NFP) and to update this plan every 15 years. The original planning efforts - in the 1980s and early 1990s - of the Pacific Northwest region of the US Forest Service aimed to meet goals and objectives to optimize or maximize net public benefit from various forests outputs and for this reason the first round of forest plans were developed using decision support tools working in a deterministic way using a linear programming approach (FORPLAN DSS, later Spectrum) to choose the best mix of management options with the goals of meeting specific objectives (Shlisky and Vandendriesche, in press). Since the 1990s the objectives of the forest management planning have changed because of a shift in social values from timber production to recreation conservation and restoration. These changes led to a change in the approach of the analysis, which has moved to a stochastic simulation approach using the VDDT DSS (Vegetation Dynamic Development Tool, ESSA 2007) (Shlisky, personal communication). VDDT is based on a state-transition model approach to simulating vegetation succession. “States” describe various stages of forest vegetation composition and structure, while the “transitions” describe the probabilities of various natural and anthropic disturbance agents (i.e. fire, insect, fungus, mammals, climate, etc.) and management interventions (i.e. tree harvests, thinning, etc.) to move from one state to another. These probabilities are assigned by the forest manager (or more in general by the users) based on expert knowledge, although work is now being done to validate the probabilities using the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), a more detailed individual tree level stand simulator based on empirical data. Different scenarios can be run using different probabilities to see the effects of alternative management strategies or assumptions about the prevalence of natural disturbances. The latest NFP revision for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (Washington State) began in 2003. Numerous delays were encountered as new national planning rules were issued but subsequently invalidated through legal challenges in the courts. Planning is done by an interdisciplinary team (ID team) of specialists from the national forest staff, under the supervision of the forest supervisor and with additional technical support and oversight from the regional office. In particular, the regional analyst has provided technical support to the ID team silviculturalist in the use of the VDDT DSS. As a starting point, the planning effort used a consistent set of VDDT models that were developed for the larger region by a cooperative project between the USFS research branch and local universities (the Integrated Landscape Assessment Project (ILAP, http://http://oregonstate.edu/inr/ilap). One of the ILAP modelers worked with the silviculturalist for XX time to help get him familiar with the process (since he was not an experienced VDDT modeler. The silviculturalist and regional analyst have further refined the ILAP models to better reflect local conditions. This ability for local adjustments was key for establishing the credibility of the models. The modeling application, running at landscape level, For forest planning purposes, forest managers of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (Washington State) used different models built by the VDDT for a primary landscape level vegetation analysis. In particular they used the timber volume models to analyze relationship between timber volume quantity representing by any of the seven structural/process classes defined by Hessburg et al. (2000). They also used the models to analyze the long term sustained yield and to evaluate the cost variation of different silvicultural treatments. As of July 2012, the planning and modeling process is still ongoing. A draft plan is expected in early 2013 and a final plan in 2014.  +
United States-The restoration strategy of the dry and mesic landscape in the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest +	Among the 16 national forests of the Northwest region, the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (OWNF) is a large and diverse area, encompassing over 4-million acres (16187 Km2) in Washington state, which extends from North to South along 180 miles (290 Km) from the Canadian border to the Goat Rocks Wilderness, in the Northwest region of USA. For at least 20 years, scientists and managers associated with the OWNF have understood that the forest has become more susceptible to uncharacteristic severe fires and to epidemic levels of insects and disease than the historical norm. Moreover, the characteristic habitats of the late-successional forests are declining (large and old trees, that are the basis of many wildlife habitats, are few in number). In addition infrastructure, as the forest’s road network, affects the conditions of aquatic ecosystems and are expensive to maintain (USDA FS, 2010). The need for a restoration strategy is reinforced by expected climate change, another stressor on the sustainability and resiliency of the forest. An initial dry forest restoration strategy was developed in 2000. It included practices such as thinning uncharacteristically dense stands of trees, and using controlled burning to remove small trees and shrubs that contribute to large and severe fires. In 2009, a new phase of the restoration strategy began thanks to the knowledge gained from the experience gathered during more than one decade and thanks to the new science findings relative to the landscape evaluation and road network evaluation. A team of 11 resource specialists (interdisciplinary team, ID team) undertook the revision of the strategy. One of the team members, a scientist at the USDA Forest Service Wenatchee Forestry Sciences Laboratory, championed use of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support tool (EMDS) for analysis and planning related to the new forest restoration strategy. The restoration strategy consists of two main stages, 1) the landscape evaluation (What is the state of the system?) and 2) the planning phase (What are reasonable responses to address the problems revealed from the evaluation stage?). EMDS was explicitly designed to support these two stages of planning, which allowed results from the assessment to be easily passed to the planning stage. While the restoration strategy considers the whole forest, restoration activities are planned and executed at the scale of subunits called “districts.” Each district is still quite large, so potential restoration activities need to be strategically located. EMDS was used to do landscape evaluations at the scale of 30-50,000 ha and then to locate high priority potential landscape treatment areas (PLTAs) within these landscapes. In this way, each assessment was able to support multiple projects and provide justification for the choice of treatment areas (USDA FS, 2010). The EMDS leads began with a pilot project to develop the restoration plan of a dry forest landscape on the Naches Ranger District. They are now building on this experience to bring the process to other districts. One of the most difficult problems related to implementation of the restoration strategy is the integration of the diverse data. The interpretation of the interactions among vegetation, wildlife habitats, aquatics, and disturbances (fire and road network) can be done by using specific tools at landscape scale but the description, analysis and quantification of the interactions among the single species and the changes within the forest communities or disturbances phenomena is much more limited (USDA FS, 2010). Moreover, the determination of the strategic placement of treatments have to take in consideration the risk to human communities and the sustainability of habitat for federal listed species. EMDS was used to integrate the results from vegetation pattern analysis, the fire movement modeling, wildlife habitats, aquatic-road interactions and the road network evaluation.  +
United States-Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan +	The NW Forest Plan is a common management strategy that was implemented in 1994 across all federal forest lands in the range of the northern spotted owl, approximately 24 million acres in western Washington, Oregon, and northern California, USA. The Plan requires monitoring of four key environmental aspects: the populations of spotted owls and marbled murrelets, the extent of old growth forests, and the condition of watersheds. Assessment of watershed condition is a complex task involving considerable social and scientific uncertainty, such as what attributes of the watershed are important and what are the influences of the myriad of watershed processes on one another. Many of the past watershed assessments had been done using expert teams, who used their best judgment to make assumptions about these complexities and uncertainties. A group of experts would be gathered with maps and data asked to rate all the watersheds in an area “good, fair, or poor”. The main problems with this approach were that such decisions were difficult to understand or repeat. A week later, the forest supervisor might not be able to explain why a particular area was rated “poor”, or a year later a different group of experts might well come up with a different set of ratings. The science team that designed AREMP understood these problems and recommended the use of a decision support system called Ecosystem Management Decision Support (or EMDS for short). EMDS could be used to capture the experts’ assessment criteria, so they would be documented and consistently applied. Other reasons for the DSS choice were that it was developed by the Forest Service and had been tested for watershed evaluations before. The AREMP team drafted an initial model internally to become familiar with the process. This initial model did not distinguish the biophysical differences between different areas of the plan (e.g. water temperature might naturally be higher in some areas than in others), nor did it capture the range of expertise available. To address these shortcomings, the AREMP team divided the Plan area into seven biophysical provinces and held a series of workshops to develop a model for each. A total of 36 experts from the Forest Service and BLM attended the 2-day workshops, and an additional 41 provided some input but did not attend. For the most part, attendees did not appear to have a difficult time understanding the modeling process concepts, after a short powerpoint presentation on it. Construction and testing of the different models was relatively rapid (a few days each) but assembling the data to run through the models took the team most of the next year. The software did not provide much support for formatting of the outputs in a format that could be easily shared with others, so this process required considerably more time and effort than anticipated. These runs were presented in second round of workshops intended to verify whether the models actually worked as intended. In most cases, at least a few changes were needed to bring the models into line with the experts’ knowledge. The model results are published every five years in a peer-reviewed formal government report (Gallo et al 2005). These reports are presented to a committee of the executives in charge of the federal agencies responsible for the Northwest Forest Plan (Regional Interagency Executive Committee). Interviews with managers and stakeholders in the process generally indicate that they consider use of the DSS to be successful (Gordon 2005), however, there is no clear evidence that results have influenced forest management decision making (nor are there any clear requirements or mechanisms for such use).  +
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VDDT-Path +	VDDT is a Windows-based program allows users to easily create and test descriptions of vegetation dynamics, simulating them non-spatially at the landscape level. Probably the most important contribution of VDDT is that it provides a common platform for specialists from different disciplines - e.g., entomology, pathology, fire ecology, silviculture, wildlife biology and ecology - to collectively define the roles of various processes and agents of disturbance on landscape-level vegetation dynamics. Moreover, the development tool allows for rapid gaming and testing of the sensitivity of the ecosystem to alternative assumptions. It thus provides a tool for learning and communication.  +
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WIS.2 +	WIS.2 focuses on providing guidance in sustainable forestry management. The system gives strong organisational and decision support in implementing, monitoring and controlling silvicultural practices. The system provides specific information for the different phases of the silvicultural process, allowing planners to simulate the mid- to long-term consequences of various action scenarios, and supporting users in solving complex silvicultural problems at multiple scales (i.e., from the whole enterprise level down to the single stand level; from very long-term to short-term). The scope of WIS.2 includes: [[Image:scope.png|thumb|300px|Scope of WIS.2]] * formalising the manifold demands of society, forest owners and stakeholders for implementation in forest management; * defining different variations of silvicultural strategy and implementation concepts, in order to assess the entrepreneurial strategy and recognize the mid- to long-term consequences; * pointing out the priority-  +
WebCorky +	WebCorky is a web adaptadion of a desktop tool present in sIMfLOR (Faias, 2012) to project cork caliber samples of a Quercus suber L. stand. The application uses equations developed by Almeida et al. (2010). WebCorky has a simple sample and multisample projection interface. The latter alows the classification of the samples evolution in time, in order to support a decision on when is the best time to debark the stand, according to userdefined cork prices and interest rates.  +
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YAFO +	YAFO is a planning-support tool for the development of management plans under uncertainty focusing on the forest enterprise level. Based on existing stand data, the software provides the calculation of management scenarios (felling plans) for single stands that are optimized with respect to financial considerations and ecological constraints. Under these constraints, YAFO predicts timber stocks, harvest amounts and financial returns for each simulation period.  +

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