A Spatial-Explicit Decision Support System for Everglades Ecological Risk Assessment and Restoration
Abstract
The purpose of this project is to make recommendations and develop a prototype for Florida spatial decision support system that meets the needs of agencies involved with habitat and ecological community evaluation of South Florida restoration initiatives.
Numerous issues surrounding Everglades ecological restoration and threats have been documented and studied by a wide variety of researchers at scales ranging from faunal genetic mixing and individual plant stem productivity to regional systems succession. Some of this data has been gathered, but this and other data remain unintegrated in a fashion that is helpful to resource managers and planners.
Decision support systems (DSS) are broadly defined as computer based systems used to aid decision makers through the use of data and models to solve instructional problems. These model and knowledge based system tools become necessary when complex geographic or domain interrelationships are considered. Development of a computerized DSS makes economic sense for integrated Everglades restoration efforts because of the large amounts of data that must be collected and processed to produce and analyze decision alternatives.
A spatial decision support system (SDSS) is projected on which decision models are integrated with, or generated from, geographic information system (GIS) analyses and display.
