A Comparison of Existing Natural Resource Management DSSs

In 1997, Mowrer et al. published a survey of 24 of the leading natural resource management decision support systems (DSSs) developed in government, academia, and the private sector in the United States. Their report identified five general trends:

1. While at least one DSS fulfilled each criteria in the questionnaire used, no single system successfully addressed all important considerations.
2. Ecological and management interactions across multiple scales were not comprehensively addressed by any of the systems evaluated.
3. The ability of current generation DSSs to address social and economic issues lags far behind biophysical issues.
4. The ability to simultaneously consider social, economic, and biophysical issues is entirely missing from current systems.
5. Group consensus-building support was missing from all but one system—a system that was highly dependent upon trained facilitation personnel. In addition, systems that offered explicit support for choosing among alternatives provided decision makers with only one choice of methodology.

The reviewers noted that little or no coordination had occurred between the 24 development teams, resulting in large, monolithic, stand-alone systems, each with a substantially different concept of the natural resource management process and how to support it.

Different DSSs appear to support different parts of the natural resource management process. Thistable (Table:Existing ecosystem management decision support software for forest conditions of the United States )lists 33 DSSs, the 24 systems surveyed by Mowrer et al. plus 9 DSSs not included in that study. Nineteen of the 33 are labeled full service DSSs at their scale of operation because they attempt to be comprehensive—offering or planning to offer support for a complete natural resource management process. These DSSs can be further classified by the scale of support that is their primary focus: regional assessments, forest planning, or project-level planning. The remainder, labeled functional service modules, provide specialized support for one or a few phases of the entire natural resource management process. These service modules can be organized according to the type of functional support they provide: group negotiations, vegetation dynamics, disturbance simulation, spatial visualization, and interoperable system architecture.