U.S. Forest Service Uses Decision Support System for Ecological Assessments

ArcView GIS and Knowledge-Based Technology

A knowledge-based environment, integrated with a GIS interface, allows users to make better decisions and improve the efficiency of their work. The Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system, developed by scientists from the U.S.D.A. Forest Service, the Agricultural Research Service, Penn State University, and programmers from ESRI, Knowledge Garden, Inc., and Rules of Thumb, Inc., is a knowledge-based system designed to facilitate the complex ecological assessments faced by the U.S. Forest Service (a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) on a daily basis. For example, the EMDS system could synthesize the relationships among environmental factors such as water quality and depth to identify the location of preferred spawning habitats for a particular salmon species.

The EMDS System

The EMDS Version 2.0 is an application for knowledge-based decision support of environmental assessments. This system provides interested users with a complete framework for developing their own knowledge bases and integrating them into GIS. The various components of the system include ArcView GIS, NetWeaver, and the assessment system that consists of the Analysis and Data Acquisition Manager (DAM) subsystems.

ArcView GIS, as the overall program manager, provides the primary EMDS system interface in which projects can be created, viewed, and edited. NetWeaver provides a knowledge-based development environment that describes the logical relationships among environmental factors, underlying ecosystems states and processes, and necessary data. The Analysis subsystem provides an interface to the knowledge base for running NetWeaver and is the key component in processing the information. DAM evaluates the influence of missing data and allows the user to prioritize what data need to be collected. It can then illustrate where information is missing. The ability of knowledge-based applications to reason with incomplete information is a unique and important feature of NetWeaver.

Plans for the Future

The EMDS development team is very excited about this system and is already making plans for future versions of the system. According to Dr. Keith M. Reynolds, team leader on the EMDS project, "EMDS Version 2.0 is a significant step forward in ecological assessment in that it integrates a powerful, intuitive, knowledge-based system into the GIS environment."

For more information about EMDS Version 2.0 and to download your free copy, please visit http://www.fsl.orst.edu/emds/.