Developing Inventory and Monitoring Programs Based on Multiple Objectives

Resource inventory and monitoring (l&M) programs in national parks combine multiple objectives in order to create a plan of action over a finite time horizon. Because all program activities are constrained by time and money, it is critical to plan l&M activities that make the best use of available agency resources, However, multiple objectives complicate a relatively straightforward allocation process. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) offers a structure for multiobjective decision making so that decision-makers’ preferences can be formally incorporated in seeking potential solutions, Within the AHP, inventory and monitoring program objectives and decision criteria are organized into a hierarchy. Pairwise comparisons among decision elements at any level of the hierarchy provide a ratio scale ranking of those elements, The resulting priority values for all projects are used as each project’s contribution to the value of an overall l&M program. These priorities, along with budget and personnel constraints, are formulated as a zero/one integer programming problem that can be solved to select those projects that produce the best program. An extensive example illustrates how this approach is being applied to l&M projects in national parks in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, The proposed planning process provides an analytical framework for multicriteria decisionmaking that is rational, consistent, explicit, and