Project website

Primary Investigator

Email

Institution

Delcambre, Lois

lmd@cse.ogi.edu

Oregon Graduate Institute

Abstract
Historically, forest management practices aimed to maximize harvests, put out fires, and create plots of a common age and species. More recently, there is an increasing awareness that forests must be managed to reflect a broad range of local, regional and national objectives, including ecological, economic, social and recreational.

The Adaptive Management Areas program is a multi-agency initiative (USDA Forest Service, USDI Bureau of Land Management, USDI Fish and Wildlife Service) to develop and test innovative forest practices at a range of representative sites throughout the Pacific Northwest. They have been targeted at regions affected by reduced timber harvests from federal lands, and seek to involve public, industry and private landowners as well as other interested parties from local communities. A key goal of the Adaptive Management Areas program is to disseminate what is learned at the various sites in terms of new practices, ecosystem monitoring, consensus building, and scientific research.

This project involves researchers from Oregon Graduate Institute and other schools working with federal agencies to design and prototype an ""Adaptive Management Portal"" to make Adaptive Management information available in an open, natural and useful way to all parties interested in forest lands. To that end, our work involves continual interaction with both the producers and potential consumers of this information, to ensure that the portal can be maintained in a cost-effective manner, while meeting the information needs of interested parties.

A key technical question is to what extent ""superimposed information"" (information overlaid on the base set of resources) can help realize these goals. We are particularly interested in thematic organizations based on terminology in common use in the forest practices domain, and the ability for arbitrary users to augment the system with their own annotations, linkages and collations that might be of use to others.