Decision support system for the sustainable forest management

This paper discusses the methodological component of a decision support sys tem being developed for the sustainable forest management at the forest man agement unit level. A geographic information system-based multi-criteria ev aluation technique for measuring sustainability of forest management is und er development. It integrates and utilises spatial and temporal data on div erse ecological, economic and social variables, while handling data and dec ision-rule uncertainty. A decision support approach using the concept of as piration-based utility functions is proposed for formulating forest land us e strategies to improve sustainability. It combines the use of linear progr amming and geographic information systems. As such, the paper attempts to b ridge the gap between considerable research work done on developing the fra mework for measuring sustainability of forest management and a lack of simi lar efforts in monitoring and using these indicators as a formal part of th e planning system. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.