Ecosystem management decision support for federal forests in the United States: A review

Ecosystem management has been adopted as the philosophical paradigm guiding management on many federal forests in the United States. The strategic goa l of ecosystem management is to find a sensible middle ground between ensur ing long-term protection of the environment while allowing an increasing po pulation to use its natural resources for maintaining and improving human l ife. Ecosystem management has all the characteristics of 'wicked' problems that are tricky, complex, and thorny. Ambiguities, conflicts, internal inco nsistencies, unknown but large costs, lack of organized approaches, institu tional shock and confusion, lack of scientific understanding of management consequences, and turbulent, rapidly changing power centers all contribute to the wickedness of the ecosystem management paradigm. Given that ecosyste m management, Like human survival and welfare, is a wicked problem, how can we proceed to tame it? Managers need to use the same tools that people hav e always used for handling such problems - knowledge, organization, judicio us simplification, and inspired leadership. The generic theory of decision support system development and application is well developed. Numerous spec ific ecosystem management decision support systems (EM-DSS) have been devel oped and are evolving in their capabilities. There is no doubt that given a set of ecosystem management processes to support and adequate time and res ources, effective EM-DSS can be developed. On the other hand, there is cons iderable doubt that sufficiently detailed, explicitly described and widely accepted processes for implementing ecosystem management can be crafted giv en the current institutional, educational, social and political climate. A socio-political climate in which everyone wants to reap the benefits and no one wants to pay the costs, incapacitates the federal forest management de cision making process. Developing a workable ecosystem management process a nd the decision making tools to support it is probably one of the most comp lex and urgent challenges facing us today. This paper offers a concise revi ew of the state of the art of decision support systems related to implement ing ecosystem management. A conceptual model of the context in which ecosys tem management is expected to function is presented. Next, a candidate for an operational ecosystem management process is described and others are ref erenced. Finally, a generic ecosystem management decision support system is presented and many existing systems briefly described. (C) Published by El sevier Science 1999.