Meeting the moment: decision support amidst great environmental change and uncertainty

Abstract

Decision making is inherently a complex social and cultural process that is shaped by myriad influential factors both internal and external to the environments, people, and institutions affected. Natural resource management is no exception in this regard. As the Earth’s climate rapidly changes, disturbances increasingly threaten forests across the globe, while the demand for resilient conditions and ecosystem services increases. As risks and threats to forests are building, so are assumptions, uncertainties, and stakes associated with management and mitigation outcomes. Decision support tools (DSTs) serve many functions in landscape and forest management, most centrally in helping decision makers and interest holders cope with complexity and uncertainty. Similarly, increasingly complex data, statistics, ecosystem dynamics, uncertainty, and technological advances have driven the evolution and integration of DSTs into forest and landscape management decision processes. We explore five factors driving DST development and integration into forest ecosystem management: environmental change, risk management, call for transparency, implicit and explicit social contracts, and technological advancement. We identify the challenges that DST growth and expanding deployment have addressed, as well as the emerging dilemmas that their current and future uses are likely to create. As environmental risks mount with changing climate, and computing capabilities continue to advance (e.g., statistical models, artificial intelligence), social norms and priorities are also changing. DSTs are expected to become central to forest and landscape management to help adjudicate the complexities of managed and unmanaged systems, the consequences of management actions and inaction, and their impact on environmental quality and forest resilience.