James Strittholt and Mike White have published a chapter in Making Transparent Environmental Management Decisions: Applications of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support System called Forest Conservation Planning.
The Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system has been used around the world to support environmental analysis and planning in many different application areas, and it has been applied over a wide range of geographic scales, from forest stands to entire countries. An extensive sampling of this diversity of applications is presented in section 2, in which EMDS application developers describe the varied uses of the system. These accounts, together with the requisite background in section 1, provide valuable practical insights into how the system can be applied in the general domain of environmental management.Part II contains nine chapters that describe use of the system in specific application areas. In general, each chapter provides some background on the application domain, motivations for using EMDS in this context, a brief review of other EMDS applications in the domain, if applicable, a fuller discussion of a specific application, and aspects of analyses that worked well and didn’t work well.
White and Stritholt (‘‘Forest Conservation Planning’’) describe an EMDS application for spatially explicit conservation planning in forested landscapes. Its application is illustrated in two case studies: a conservation assessment of 1.5 million acres of the northern California Sierra Nevada region that was used to prioritize and expand land protection, and an 18 million acre conservation value assessment of the Alberta Foothills region that was used in multiuse forest planning. These case studies demonstrate how EMDS can be used to model diverse and complex landscape characteristics, using information about mixed precision, to inform conservation decision making across large regions.
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