Knowledge - Based Decision Support for Environmental Assessment

—EMDS is a knowledge-based decision support system for the design and conduct of ecological assessments at any geographic scale. ArcView provides the primary system interface to the EMDS system. The NetWeaver development system incorporated into EMDS provides a knowledge base development environment in which an assessment team assembles a knowledge base that describes the logical relations (dependencies) among topics of interest to an assessment, underlying ecosystem states and processes, and data needed to evaluate topics, states, and processes. The Assessment system includes two subsystems: 1) the Analysis subsystem provides an interface to the knowledge base performing analyses. Knowledge-based reasoning as implemented in the NetWeaver knowledge base engine provides powerful analytical capabilities for environmental assessment; 2) the Data Acquisition Manager uses information about the influence of missing data, and information gathered from the user about the ease of acquiring missing data to prioritize missing data as an aid to planning new data collection to improve an assessment. INTRODUCTION The objective of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) project is to improve the quality of environmental assessments and the efficiency with which they are performed. EMDS version 1.0 is an application framework for knowledge-based decision support of environmental assessments that integrates state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) and knowledge-based reasoning technologies in the Microsoft Windows environment to conduct analyses at any geographic scale.2 We describe the EMDS system as an application framework, in part at least, because it does not come "ready to run out of the box." Instead, the system provides a very general solution method (e.g., a framework) for conducting environmental assessments. Perhaps sometime in the future, environmental assessment teams will be able to assemble a list of all topics they want to include in an assessment, assemble a list of data requirements needed to address those topics, and find they have all the required data. In the meantime, however, assessments routinely need to deal with incomplete data. There may be some missing observations for several to many data types. There may be no data at all for (possibly many) others. One solution to the problem of missing data is to tailor the assessment to existing data. However, this is a poor way to conduct an assessment of environmental phenomena with complex inter-relations because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, in such an approach to infer what is not known about the data that might be relevant to the assessment and how influential omitted data might be for determining observed ecosystem states and processes. 1Keith Reynolds, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Corvallis, OR 97331. Phone: 541750-7434. FAX: 541-750-7329. Email: [email protected]. Scott Murray, Environmental Systems Research Institute, 380 New York Street, Redlands, CA 92373. Phone: 909-793-2853. Email: [email protected]. Michael Saunders, Entomology Dept., 501 ASI Bldg, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802. Phone: 814-8632979. Email: [email protected]. John Slade, Knowledge Garden, Inc., 5116 Hartwick Lane, West Palm Beach, FL 33415. Phone: 561-615-8209. Email: [email protected]. Bruce Miller, Rules of Thumb, Inc., P.O. Box 406, North East, PA 16428. Phone: 814-725-2312. Email: [email protected] 2The use of trade or firm names in this publication is for reader information and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture of any product or service.