United States-Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan

Case

Has flag
Has full name	Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan
Has country	United States
Has location	Northwest (Washington, Oregon, N California)
Has responsible organisation	USDA Forest Service
Has type of owner organization	national administration
Has related DSS	EMDS
Has start date	2002
Has end date
Has DSS development stage	update
Has decision stage	monitoring
Has temporal scale	Long term (strategic)
Has spatial context	Spatial with no neighbourhood interrelations
Has spatial scale	Regional/national level
Has decision making dimension	More than one decision maker/stakeholder
Has objectives dimension	Multiple objectives
Has goods and services dimension	Non-market services
Has working group theme	Knowledge management
Has website	http://www.reo.gov/monitoring/watershed-overview.shtml
Has description	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).
Has reference	Gallo, K.; Lanigan, S.H.; Eldred, P.; Gordon, S.N.; Moyer, C. 2005. Northwest Forest Plan—the first 10 years (1994–2003): preliminary assessment of the condition of watersheds. General Technical Report PNW-GTR-647. Portland, OR : USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Gordon, S.N. 2006. Decision support systems for forest biodiversity management: A review of tools and an analytical-deliberative framework for understanding their successful application. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University. Lanigan, Steven H.; Gordon, Sean N.; Eldred, Peter; Isley, Mark; Wilcox, Steve; Moyer, Chris; Andersen, Heidi. 2012. Northwest Forest Plan - the first 15 years (1994-2008): status and trend of watershed condition. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-856. Portland, OR:U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Xxx p.
Has wiki contact person	Sean Gordon
Has wiki contact e-mail	sean.gordon@pdx.edu
Has DSS development	United States-Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan.Description of DSS development
Has decision support techniques	United States-Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan.Decision support techniques
Has knowledge management processes	United States-Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan.Knowledge management process
Has support for social participation	United States-Watershed Condition Assessment for the Northwest Forest Plan.Support of social participation

• has related Lesson:An iterative process of presenting results to subject matter experts enabled them to better, DSS helped document and apply decision criteria consistently, and therefore produced a more, Model building was rapid, it was assembling the data that took by far the most time, Spatial variation between regions led to the development of different regional models, which led to, The analysis team used internal prototyping, which helped train the staff and identify possible, The software did not provide much support for formatting of the outputs in a format that could be, Use of the DSS has been considered successful by the participating organizations, even though it has