Making Ecosystem Health Data and Information Useful to Decision Makers

Updated 02/27/2009

Melvin R. George. Extension Range Specialist
University of California, Davis

Federal agencies are charged with the task of reporting to Congress on the health of the nations ecosystems. In California, the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is charged by the state legislature to report on the status of the state's forest and rangeland resources each decade. Special projects, such as the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project were charged to assess the health of specific landscapes. Inventory and assessment of our resource base so that we can detect and document change over time is crucial to maintaining the productive potential and resource values of California landscapes. Assessing and documenting forest and rangeland health is a continuing technical issue for land management agencies, professional societies and Congress.

As we extend our inventory and assessment strategies to include biodiversity, water quantity and quality, habitat and other landscape attributes in addition to our long tradition of monitoring forest stands, ecological sites and rangeland ecological status, we must incorporate approaches that assess appropriate processes at several spatial and temporal scales. New technology including remote sensing, geographic information systems, global positioning technology, modeling and expert systems, and geostatistics is increasingly used to assess ecological processes or their surrogates along with traditional field indicators.

To bring ecosystem monitoring into routine use, resulting information must be made useful to a variety of decision makers. Following is an initial assessment of how to make ecosystem health data and information more useful to decision makers.

Who are the decision makers?

Before we can determine how to make information useful for decision making, we need to determine who the decision makers are and what information or data they want or need. To an extension educator embarking on a new education initiative that means we need to do a "needs assessment." So, who are the decision makers, what do they need to know and how can we help them? In California the array of decision makers seems endless and the following list of categories no doubt leaves someone out:

• Private land owners and managers
• Public land managers
• State and local agencies
• Water management districts
• Fish & wildlife managers and regulators
• Water quality regulators
• Land and water use planners
• Grass roots stakeholder groups
• Youth groups
• Conservation and restoration groups
• Consultants

For ecological or natural resource data and information to be useful to a decision maker it must answer questions that will help the decision maker solve problems associated with natural phenomena and human actions. In the real world decision makers are individuals who manage private and public land; implement water quality or endangered species regulations; develop habitat, basin and land use plans; and numerous other land use activities. While each of these decision maker groups will have different needs, many of their question or information needs start out in the form of these three basic questions:

• What is the problem?
• Who says its a problem?
• How do I fix it?

Questions and Objectives

Given these decision makers and questions how can we help? First we can help restate the questions so that they address change. Second we can help the decision maker turn the questions into measurable objectives that are within the ecological, technical, economic and social limits of the system. Land use problems and issues are usually the result of some real or perceived change in the landscape. Often problem questions can be restated as change questions:

• How have patterns on the land changed and how will they change in the future?
• How will these changes effect resource values and hazards?
• What is the potential impact of our decisions or policies on the landscape?
• How can change be achieved?
• What are the warning signs of impending change?
• What data/information should we assess or monitor to detect change?

From these questions decision makers, whether individuals or groups, can develop goals and objectives based on desired outcomes (changes or products). Desired outcomes can be linked to one or more spatial scales and ecological processes. While decision makers are seldom versed in landscape ecology, a properly trained advisor can often craft the decision maker's information needs into questions about processes linked to appropriate scales. Because landscape ecology is new and unfamiliar to most decision makers information needs are not couched in terms of landscape ecology.

Recognition that problems and issues are linked to several spatial scales, seductive technology to visualize landscape conditions and changes, and recognition of watershed/basin and habitats as the land unit for management sets the stage for spatial analysis to become the norm rather than the exception. What it will take to bring landscape analysis into routine use is strong education programs for decision makers, landscape analysis experts and models to support watershed and habitat level activities, and accessible analysis technology.

Education Programs

The first thing we need to do is educate the decision maker about the quality and limits of the information and technologies that we can provide. Emergent and maturing technologies such as G.P.S., GIS, remote sensing and geostatistics enable us to visually display change to decision makers in a very appealing and seductive manner. Quantitative and qualitative models allow us to predict change, often with a large margin for error. Before these pretty pictures get us into trouble we need to educate decision makers about the potential and limits of this technology. We need to help decision makers cope with uncertainty attached to data, information, weather, social change, etc. We need to develop in real and virtual space a place where decision makers can "play" with change. Where they can test out the potential consequences of the actions. A place where they can discover the potential outcomes (consequences) of a decision.

Many land management or regulatory agencies have landscape analysis expertise in their agencies. What they don't have are decision makers that understand the capabilities and limits of the technology. If the technology of landscape analysis is going to be used to assess and document problems, predict resource products and hazards, and monitor change; it will eventually affect the lives of those who live in or depend on the landscape for resource values. While agency staff may believe in the technology, land owners and other stakeholders will have a healthy scepticism of the methods and may not be seduced by the visual effects. In fact they are likely to be incensed that "big brother" is watching. The message here is that if this technology is to be used to affect the lives of stakeholders an education program should be implemented so that they understand the capabilities and limits of this new technology.

Experts and Models

While the development of the technology and science of landscape analysis has been largely financed by government agencies supported by tax dollars, when a grass roots group wants access to the technology it is only forth coming if they have money. One of the great services that universities and natural resource agencies could provide watershed and other grass roots groups is access to the products of remote sensing, global positioning technology, geographic information systems, and other landscape analysis technology. Access to this technology is the only way that the public will come to understand and trust this technology.

Decision makers need advise from experts. Increasingly there are not enough natural resource experts to go around. I believe that our task of information transfer would be enhanced if we could bring an expert system into adaptive management processes for the purpose of predicting and visualizing potential landscape changes with stakeholder groups. We need a qualitative model that embodies the knowledge of experts on how sites, watersheds, landscapes and regions will change given management or natural disturbances. Recently we developed a state and transition expert system linked to a geographic information system to predict and visualize landscape change Plant et al (in press). While qualitative simulation has the disadvantage of being less precise than traditional numerical simulation, it has the advantage of being able to generate a more robust simulation of complex vegetation communities. This model was tested by comparing model simulations to a series of black and white aerial photographs of a oak woodland rangeland site. The model was found to agree generally with the observed data but to also have differences. Successfully implemented, this model could be used to demonstrate long term consequences of fire, tree cutting, protection from fire and other processes that influence species composition. Others have developed qualitative and quantitative models that predict pollutant loading, habitat values and other site to landscape level attributes (Maxwell and Costanza 1992).

Public Policy Focus on Basins and Habitats

The CWA and ESU insure that basins and habitats will be the scale of interest. Water quality regulators focus on waterbodies and their small to large watersheds. Fish and Wildlife managers and regulators will focus on population estimates and habitat values at small to large scales depending on the mobility and extent of the endangered species.

If we compare the data collected during a rangeland health assessment to the data needed by land, water, vegetation and wildlife managers, regulators and policy makers we see that this is only a small part of the data needed. For example, a water quality regulator is concerned with the beneficial (designated) uses of water, impairments to the beneficial uses (pollution), sources of point and nonpoint pollution, best management practices and monitoring of implementation and practice effectiveness. A great deal of this information is contained in basin plans and impaired water body assessments (303d list) required by the Clean Water Act. Only when they begin to seek sources of pollutants do their information needs move downscale focusing on land uses often at the site or property level. Only at this level do questions of rangeland health point data become useful for describing or explaining the state of upland or stream systems and their contribution to nonpoint source pollution.

Literature Cited

Maxwell, Thomas and Robert Costanza. 1992. Spatial Ecosystem Modeling in a Distributed Computational Environment. International Soc. for Ecol. Econ. Stockholm, Sweden.

Plant, Richard E., Marc P. Vayassieres, Steven E. Greco, Melvin R. George, and Theodore Adams 1999. A qualitative spatial model of hardwood rangeland state-and transition vegetation dynamics. J. Range Manage. 52:50-58.

December 6, 1998

< Back to Agenda