Decision Support Capabilities for Future Technology Requirements

Abstract : Managing land ("place-based") resources has become a challenging task. Federal land resource managers face complex decisions to balance many goals. As decisionmaking becomes more complex, demands increase for technologies to help decisionmakers explore and evaluate issues, and channel participants towards endpoints and decisions. Since 1997, the Interagency Group on Decision Support (IGDS) has provided a forum for agency staff and stakeholders to meet and exchange information on currently available decision-support tools. The IGDS vision led to the establishment of the Aurora Partnership, which is a collaboration of government, university, and private sector organizations. The Partnership engages in an open collaborative process to share ideas, information, and technologies to advance tools and systems that will enable the practical use of natural and social science in decisionmaking. This work reflects the outcome of one of a series of workshops aimed at addressing the goals and objectives of the IGDS and the Aurora Partnership to: (1) improve the interoperability, modularity, and transferability of decision-support tools and services, (2) develop and apply decision science principles to place-based management decisionmaking, and (3) incorporate both the decision science principles and tools into a science-based decision support framework.