What Do Users Really Need? Participatory Development of Decision Support Tools for Environmental Management Based on Outcomes

Richard Hewitt,Christopher Macleod

doi:10.3390/environments4040088

Abstract

There is increasing demand from stakeholders for tools to support outcomes-based approaches in environmental management. For such tools to be useful, understanding user requirements is key. In Scotland, UK, stakeholders were engaged in the development of an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS) to support the management of land and freshwater resources for multiple policy outcomes. A structured participatory engagement process was employed to determine stakeholder requirements, establish development principles to fulfil these requirements and road-test prototypes. The specification that emerged from this bottom-up process was for an EDSS to be spatially-explicit, free at the point of use, and mobile device compatible. This application, which is under development, does not closely resemble most existing published EDSS. We suggest that there is a mismatch between the way scientists typically conceptualise EDSS and the kinds of applications that are likely to be useful to decision-makers on the ground. Interactive mobile and web-based geospatial information services have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, but their importance is not reflected in the literature on EDSS. The current focus in environmental management on adaptive, stakeholder-centred strategies based on outcomes offers an opportunity to make better use of these new technologies to aid decision-making processes.

Highlights

Research in environmental science is often undertaken under the premise that scientific information and knowledge is necessary to inform environmental policy and management
Using the list of screening criteria (Table 1) we reduced a long list of 19 software options to seven for further hands-on testing and development
In order to review these options in a structured way, we developed a set of seven criteria

Summary

Introduction

Research in environmental science is often undertaken under the premise that scientific information and knowledge is necessary to inform environmental policy and management This has led to the widespread development of computerized tools to bridge the divide between scientific analysis of the state of the environment (e.g., water quality, biodiversity, land use change) and environmental policy objectives (e.g., European directives on freshwater quality and terrestrial biodiversity conservation measures). These tools fall approximately into two types, though in practice there is a great deal of overlap. Like QUICKScan ([18]) are targeted at more local scales and over shorter timeframes e.g., to help multiple stakeholders to negotiate, compare options and understand trade-offs in the implementation of concrete policies

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion