NED-2 is a sophisticated, intelligent, goal driven, and integrated multi-agent decision support system for forest ecosystem management. NED-2 currently integrates various forest mangement tools and models, including vegetation growth and yield models, wildlife models, management models for timber, ecology, water, and visual quality goals, GIS reporting tool, HTML report generating tool, etc.. T...

Priorities for protecting ecosystem services must be identified to ensure future human well-being. Approaches to broad-scale spatial prioritization of ecosystem services are becoming increasingly popular and are a vital precursor to identifying locations where further detailed analyses of the management of ecosystem services is required (e.g., examining trade-offs among management actions). Pri...

E service is the collective name for the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. As a scientific concept, it can be dated back to the 1960s; whereas, the proliferation of ecosystem service research has been since the late 1990s driving by the increasing environmental concerns of human societies. Ecosystem service has been defined from an anthropocentric perspective that links ecosystems an...

Much research in recent years has analyzed the ecosystem service aspect of forests, while highlighting the need for sustainable forests. Forest management mechanisms at an inter-institutional level in Japan have been identified to hinder the implementation of forest management that is focused on the equal production of ecosystem services. This study presents an institutional analysis of unsusta...

In recent decades, Mediterranean landscapes have been affected by human-induced drivers, such as land use and climate change. Forest ecosystems and landscapes have been particularly affected in mountainous regions due to limited management and stewardship, especially in remote areas. Therefore, there is a need to set up new strategies to enhance ecosystem services in forested areas which, in tu...

Vegetation change and anthropogenic development are altering ecosystems and decreasing biodiversity. Successful management of ecosystems threatened by multiple stressors requires development of ecosystem conservation plans rather than single species plans. We selected the big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) ecosystem to demonstrate this approach. The area occupied by the sagebrush ecosys...

Agriculture in the United States faces major challenges for the 21st Century; it is at a pivotal stage in terms of integrating societal demands for sustainability and enhanced quality of life from agricultural lands. A growing understanding that farms play key roles in provisioning a wide range of ecosystem services is converging with a surge in public interest in the sustainability of farming ...

Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) was developed to move beyond single species management by incorporating ecosystem considerations for the sustainable utilization of marine resources. Due to the wide range of fishery characteristics, including different goals of fisheries management across regions and species, theoretical best practices for EBFM vary greatly. Here we highlight the lac...

One of the challenges in fisheries management as it moves from a single-species to an ecosystem approach, is to meet the ecological and management needs of fish, seabirds, marine mammals, and humans, all of which operate over widely different spatial scales. This relatively new approach to fisheries management involves developing and fine-tuning predictive models that incorporate complex food w...