A Decision Support System for Assessing Trade-Offs between Ecosystem Management Goals: An Application in Portugal

Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo,José Borges,Marc Mcdill,Vladimir Bushenkov

doi:10.3390/f6010065

Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo, José Borges + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/f6010065

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Abstract

Cork oak (Quercus suber L.) and holm oak (Quercus rotundifolia) ecosystems are characteristic of Mediterranean forestry in Portugal. Even though cork is the most valuable product, these ecosystems provide multiple products and services. Assessing trade-offs between multiple goals is thus critical for the effectiveness of oak ecosystem management planning. This paper focuses on the development of a decision support system for oak ecosystems’ scenario analysis including multiple criteria. It includes an innovative decision support systems (DSS) functionality to assess trade-offs between the criteria that may support negotiation and consensus building between decision-makers and forest stakeholders. Specifically, a module that encapsulates the Feasible Goals Method/Interactive Decision Maps (FGM/IDM) technique is developed for interactive visualization of the Pareto frontier. The Pareto frontier illustrates the degree to which improving one particular criterion requires accepting sacrifices in the achievements of others. It thus provides information about trade-offs between competing decision-makers’ preferences. Results are discussed for a large-scale application encompassing over 1 million ha of cork and holm oak forest ecosystems in Southern Portugal. This study demonstrates the potential of the new DSS functionality to enhance multi-objective forest planning, namely by facilitating participation by stakeholders and providing transparency to the decision-making processes.

Highlights

Mediterranean oak ecosystem management encompasses multiple economic, social, and ecological objectives
This paper focuses on the development and the demonstration of the potential use of a decision support systems (DSS) functionality to assess the trade-offs between ecosystem management planning and/or policy analysis criteria, which may be very useful to facilitate communication, cooperation, negotiation, and information sharing between stakeholders with a wide range of preferences and interests
Results demonstrated the potential of the new DSS integrated functionality to provide decision-makers with information to develop management strategies

Summary

Introduction

Mediterranean oak ecosystem management encompasses multiple economic, social, and ecological objectives. Stimulated by developments in business administration and industry, decision support systems (DSS) have facilitated this integration, contributing to the quality and transparency of decision-making in natural resource management [1]. They provide support to solve forestry problems by integrating database management systems with simulation, analytical and operational research models, graphic display, tabular reporting capabilities, and the expert knowledge of scientists, managers, and decision-makers [1]. The case of Mediterranean forest ecosystem management planning is not an exception and several authors have highlighted the contribution of DSS to increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of its business processes [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]

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