Following the passing of landmark environmental legislation and the establishment of the US EPA, rapid progress was made in addressing the most pressing and tractable environmental pollution problems through regulation and technological solutions. Less easily defined, “wicked” environmental management problems require integration and consideration of social, economic, and ecological dimensions affecting emerging goals such as ecological restoration, resilience, and human well-being. The multi-disciplinary nature of such problems necessitates methods and means to include community stakeholder values to inform management objectives and performance metrics, combined with technical/scientific expertise for integrated assessment and evaluation of proposed solutions. DASEES is a web-based tool predicated on the precepts of decision analysis, aimed at enabling users to better formulate, assess, evaluate, and communicate tradeoffs for complex issues. The DASEES user-interface provides a suite of tools for structuring and analyzing environmental management problems amenable to a broad range of stakeholder expertise. The potential of DASEES to support the integration of social and ecological preferences for prioritized ecosystem restoration in the Puget Sound basin is demonstrated.
Results/Conclusions
How DASEES can integrate human well-being endpoints into the evaluation of management alternatives for Puget Sound watershed test groups will be demonstrated. DASEES provides tools to support structured inclusion of stakeholder values, objectives, relevant metrics and data, and models for evaluating stakeholder proposed solutions for ecosystem restoration. Alternative evaluation, (the stakeholder-derived valuation of data/science-driven metric assessments), can be implemented through 1) Consequence Tables suitable for more rapid screening evaluations where there is minimal uncertainty, and 2) Bayesian network evaluations where there may be more uncertainty and/or a need to better characterize important socio-ecologic causal linkages to metrics. These tools within DASEES provide a basis for understanding the tradeoffs and incorporating the concerns of stakeholders and decision makers interested in better inclusion of social and ecological data for resource management.