United States-Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan
Case
| Has flag | |
|---|---|
| Has full name | Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan |
| Has country | United States |
| Has location | Idaho |
| Has responsible organisation | USDA Forest Service |
| Has type of owner organization | national administration |
| Has related DSS | VDDT |
| Has start date | 1997 |
| Has end date | 2003 |
| Has DSS development stage | use |
| Has decision stage | design, choice |
| Has temporal scale | long term (strategic), medium term (tactical) |
| Has spatial context | spatial with neighbourhood interrelations, spatial with no neighbourhood interrelations |
| Has spatial scale | regional/national level, forest level |
| Has decision making dimension | more than one decision maker/stakeholder |
| Has objectives dimension | multiple objectives |
| Has goods and services dimension | market wood products, non-market services |
| Has working group theme | Models & techniques |
| Has website | http://www.fs.usda.gov/main/sawtooth/landmanagement/planning |
| Has description | National forests are required to update their management plans every 10–15 years. The adjacent Boise, Payette, and Sawtooth National Forests in southern Idaho and northern Utah decided to update their plans together in order to better understand larger landscape issues and to address their many common concerns more efficiently. National forest plans do not make specific decisions about timber harvesting or other activities, but rather have been described as more akin to land use zoning in determining overall rules and activities appropriate for certain areas. As part of planning, forests are required to calculate an “Allowable Sale Quantity” (ASQ) of timber, which led the forest to use Spectrum, a linear optimization DSS developed by the Forest Service. The Forests soon realized that the basic forest growth and harvesting model could be expanded to help evaluate other effects of the different possible management alternatives. The model was expanded to include 120 vegetation classes (combinations of vegetation types, successional stages, and canopy closures) that were distributed across seven land allocation zones over 50 years for each of seven broad management alternatives. To get a more detailed view of the feasibility of these alternatives, the RELM DSS was used to take these Spectrum outputs and distribute them further down to 6th field watersheds (about 200 per forest). Because fire is an important influence in the region that was not explicitly modeled by Spectrum and because there was some suspicion of inherent biases in optimization modeling, a parallel modeling exercise using the VDDT DSS was also undertaken near the end of the planning process. (VDDT is a state-transition simulation model that had also been used to model the unforested parts of the planning area).
The analytical complexity of the case was high. The forests cover a relatively large area (6.6 million acres), and analyses of management options were disaggregated to the subwatershed level (approximately 200 per forest). Habitat trends were analyzed for seven alternatives over 50 years. The effects on approximately 20–30 species were analyzed, ~10 quantitatively and the rest qualitatively. The analytical complexity was considerable, but we could say it was limited by choosing no more than seven alternatives, modeling them for no more than 50 years (some other National Forest Plans have gone up to 150 years), looking at the subwatershed (rather than stand-level), and using groups of indicator species, rather than trying to model effects on all species. Social complexity of the case was also high because national forest planning is an open stakeholder process that has a direct effect on the allocation of resources. The social complexity of the modeling process was somewhat limited by the fact that the public was not directly involved at all points and only saw the end results of the modeling in formal presentations. |
| Has reference | Johnson, K.N.; Gordon, S.N.; Duncan, S.; et al. 2007. Conserving creatures of the forest: A guide to decision making and decision models for forest biodiversity. Corvallis, OR: College of Forestry, Oregon State University. 88 pp. Internet: http://ncseonline.org/sites/default/files/A10%20%28II%29%20Final%20Report%20ConservingCreatures%208.21.07.pdf |
| Has wiki contact person | Sean Gordon |
| Has wiki contact e-mail | sean.gordon@pdx.edu |
| Has DSS development | United States-Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan.Description of DSS development |
| Has decision support techniques | United States-Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan.Decision support techniques |
| Has knowledge management processes | United States-Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan.Knowledge management process |
| Has support for social participation | United States-Boise-Payette-Sawtooth National Forest Plan.Support of social participation |
