Exploring, forecasting and visualizing alternative ecosystem management scenarios

Over the last decade we have seen considerable change in social values and forest ecosystem knowledge triggering a plethora of complex forest management alternatives. Planning and forecasting the economic, social and environmental consequences of these options requires sophisticated computer models, which are seldom easy to understand. This paper describes how an interdisciplinary team integrated various forest modeling efforts with advanced environmental and data visualization techniques aimed at improving our ability to communicate the resulting spatio-temporal data. Ultimately, the goal of this work was to expand the ability for the public to explore, critique, and improve proposed management alternatives.