Decision-support systems for forest management

Abstract

The basic concept of sustainable development, formulated in the Brundtland report and applied to forest management by the Montreal Process, has focused attention on the need for formal decision processes (Brundtland. 1987). The application of decision theory is essential because meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is anything but a simple problem. The basic decision process involves, (1) setting goals, (2) measuring current conditions. (3) constructing alternative courses of action, (4) predicting the consequences of applying each alternative course of action, (5) analyzing the results, and (6) either looping back to an earlier point or making a decision (Mintzberg et al., 1976). The problem is that "actions today affect the availability of not only other present actions but of future actions as well. And the reason why this global procedure is only followed piecemeal, if at all, lies in the boundedness of human rationality: the inability of human beings (with or without computers) to follow it" (Simon, 2003; emphasis added). There are no more promising or important targets for forest management research than understanding how we can solve sustainable forest management problems effectively and learning how to continually improve our decision-making processes and our decision-support capabilities (Rauscher. 1996, 1999).

Citation

Rauscher, H. Michael. 2005. Decision-support systems for forest management. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 49 (2005) 1-5