Publication Information

The Introduction provides a brief historical overview of decision support technology as it has been used in natural resource management, discusses the role of decision support in ecosystem management as we see it, and summarizes the current state of the technology.

The Decision-making Process examines the sevenstep process as described in the companion science paper (Oliver and Twery, this volume). At each step, there are issues, concerns, and pitfalls to be considered. This section is also, in effect, a key to software tools and systems discussed later in the chapter, because we discuss how specific tools, and to a lesser extent systems, can usefully contribute to the decision process.

Decision Support Tools provides a brief introduction to a wide variety of software tools that are potentially valuable as aids to a decision process. Some of these tools will be relatively familiar to readers. However, we expect that many readers will have had little or no exposure to a number of these tools, so motivating examples are liberally used to suggest how and why specific tools may be useful. Discussion in this section has been kept as nontechnical as possible.

Knowledge Based Systems provides an overview of an important, and relatively new, decision support technology that is particularly valuable for handling problems that do not readily lend themselves to neat algorithmic solutions. Frequently, for example, we do not understand a problem precisely enough to develop a numerical solution. Nevertheless, enough of the problem may be understood that professionals with years of experience in the problem domain can reason about it intelligently and offer useful solutions.

Promising Possibilities picks up on the theme of where decision support technology is today from the Introduction, and speculates about what we might expect to see in the near future.