درسهایی آموخته شده از پیاده سازی VDTT و EMDS برای مدیریت و برنامه ریزی جنگل ملی اوکانوگان وناتچی(WA، USA)

The development and use of decision support systems for forest management (FMDSS) have considerably increased worldwide in the last decades in accordance with the recognition of the multifunctional role of forests. The Vegetation Dynamics Development Tool (VDDT) and Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system are used for forest planning purposes in the Pacific Northwest Region of the United States Forest Service (USFS). Lessons learned have been explored using case study methods. Important working knowledge derived from success or failure according to the users’ perspective concern data availability for modeling, expertise needed to run the tool, the models’ level of resolution, and communication between the modelers and the team involved in forest planning. Lessons learned coming from developers highlight the success of the DSS evaluating the models’ characteristics, the tool's innovation and the integration of the best available science into the models.

Since at least the early 1980s, forest management has been a hotbed of decision support system development [1]: first-generation systems were typically designed to address singular problems (silvicultural, suitability of tree species for reforestation, disease problems, etc.). In subsequent years, the need to address multiple demands for goods and services from forest ecosystems while not precluding opportunities for future generations [2], resulting in the birth of the sustainable forest management, led to the development of multifunctional systems with broader resource application. The needs of forest owners, public institutions, forest industry, and society at large to address the complex issue of sustainable forest management helped to foster this development [3], supported by the rapid progress in computing hardware and software systems engineering. The use of DSS in forest management may improve the decision making-process in all of its phases (intelligence, design, choice and implementation) and can support the choices that managers have to make considering the multitude of purposes of forests. The European experience with developing and applying forest DSS seems to have reached a level of maturity such that the COST, one of the longest-running European frameworks supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe, funded for the period 2009-2013 an Action focused on FMDSS, named FORSYS. The main objective of FORSYS was to develop guidelines for the development, testing, evaluation and application of FMDSS in multifunctional forestry. The scientific literature on FMDSS has traditionally been more focused on conceptual and application development than the use of these systems. Consequently, as one contribution to the overall FORSYS objective, researchers compiled a number of case studies to identify and share lessons learned concerning the development and use of FMDSS in the European COST countries and also in countries outside Europe, like the United States [4]. A case study provides a systematic way of looking at events, collecting data, analyzing information, and reporting the results. In such a context, descriptive case studies were conducted concerning the use of the VDDT and EMDS systems for forest planning purposes in the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest (OWNF), a forest managed by the USFS located in the state of Washington (Pacific Northwest Region of the USFS). Important observations have been identified during years of VDDT and EMDS system usage by managers, analysts and developers who have accumulated experience which was used to structure the case write-up and synthesize some powerful and sometimes painful lessons learned along the way. A lesson learned is knowledge or understanding gained by experience, that must be applicable in that it identifies a specific design, process, or decision that reduces or eliminates the potential for failures and mishaps, or reinforces a positive result [5]. Lessons learned is one of the common techniques used to transfer and share knowledge [6], and for this reason this approach was chosen to collect generalizations, based on evaluated experiences, for the drafting of guidelines for the development, testing and evaluation as well as the application of FMDSS in multifunctional forestry. The paper is organized as follows: in section 2 notes about the research plan, and study context are given; in the section 3 objectives, use, and lessons learned from the application of each systems in the OWNF plan are described; in section 4 the conclusions are presented.

This article presented lessons learned from two case studies about the application of FMDSS to two particular problems: the use of VDDT for the prediction of forest conditions through a stochastic simulation approach, and the use of EMDS for a multicriteria assessment and prioritization of landscape resiliency on the OWNF. Both systems were positively evaluated in general terms by the users and managers, and important lessons were gleaned by these case studies, related to the perspectives of the analysts, managers, and system developers. The systems analyzed here can be considered successful from the managers’ perspective because they have been in use for many years, have been peer-reviewed, and have been well accepted by the forest management community. The primary concerns of analysts relate to the amount of data needed in the modeling process and the computational phases. From their perspective, the two systems were successful because they integrate the requisite amount of data needed to describe complex problems, and they also provide synthesis to support the forest managers in decision making. Particular attention must be paid to the data needed to run the systems and to the confidence about the parameters needed for the model-building, however. Because these case studies of the EMDS and VDDT systems were conducted on applications developed in the US, a few comments are in order concerning the general use of these systems in the European context of the FORSYS COST Action. Most importantly, neither system is geographically specific, and each would be applicable to the European context. In the case of VDDT, for example, it is up to the analyst to define the relevant vegetation states, transitions between states, and the roles of disturbance agents in influencing state transitions, so VDDT is a very general solution framework for modeling landscape vegetation dynamics regardless of geographic context. Similarly, EMDS is a very general solution framework for supporting environmental analysis and planning, because the questions addressed, the associated models used to evaluate them, and the choice of spatial scale and data requirements are all determined by the analyst. To get a good sense of the very broad applicability of EMDS, readers can review the EMDS page on Wikipedia, which is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_Management_Decision_Support. Through this study, our primary goal was to contribute to the identification of lessons learned that may be used during future FMDSS development and use. The process to systematize empirical guidelines for assisting developers and users of FMDSS, within the FORSYS Action, will establish a knowledge repository built on a webbased platform that will be freely available and useful to the forestry community worldwide [30].