NED

General System description

System name: NED

NED was originally an acronym for the northeast decision model; however, since 1995 when development was expanded to include other regions of North America, the reference to the northeastern United States was dropped, and the name is now simply NED.

Brief overview

NED is a set of computer-based tools for forest ecosystem management designed to allow the analysis of the trade-offs required when managing for multiple benefits.

NED logo

Scope of the system

NED-2 is a DSS designed to help professional forest managers to evaluate current and future conditions of their forest under alternative scenarios. It uses a goal-driven approach to the analysis of inventory data and simulated plans, which distinguishes NED-2 from other available DSS or inventory processing tools. Additional tools are usable by general public, school children, and forest landowners.

System origin

• Development has been led by USDA Forest Service's Northeastern Research Station, but includes many collaborators from other federal agencies, universities, state governments and private consulting foresters throughout the eastern United States.
• NED has been developed as a goal-driven system with the intent of providing useful and scientifically credible information for project-level planning to natural resources managers.

Support for specific issues

The resource goals addressed by NED include timber production, visual qualities, water quality and quantity, wildlife habitat, forest health, and ecology.

Support for specific thematic areas of a problem type

• Silvicultural
• Certification
• Conservation
• Restoration
• Development choices / land use zoning
• Policy/intervention alternatives
• Sustainability impact assessment (SIA)

Capability to support decision making phases

[Intelligence, Design, Choice, Monitoring ]

• Intelligence: helps identify and capture management goals
• Design: provides recommendations on treatments for progressing toward management goals
• Choice: helps evaluate the extent to which alternative treatments attain management goals
• Monitor: ???

Related systems

• Stand Visualization System (SVS): used to visualize results at the stand level
• FVS: growth and yield simulator

Other NED tools:

• STEWPLAN: Forest stewardship planner
• NEDLite
• NEWILD: evaluates the habitat suitability of stand inventory data by comparing them to a set of species/habitat matrices

Data and data models

Typical spatial extent of application

Both forest and stand level. The system design allows including inventories from multiple stands within a property or management unit.

Forest data input

Depending on the users' objectives. To enable analyses for the full variety of resources a fairly detailed inventory of the forested property is needed, usually including plot data from trees, shrubs, ground flora, and down woody material, but NED will also run with minimal data sets if the user only wants timber inventory summaries, for example. There is also an import facility to allow the conversion of data files generated elsewhere that have been converted to formatted text to be imported into NED 2.

Type of information input from user (via GUI)

The users have to address their goals within the above mentioned ones.

Models

Forest models

NED-2 doesn't do the actual forest growth simulation, but it controls the flow of data to and from external forest simulation models that are installed with NED-2 (typically regional FVS variants).

Social models

NED-2 provides the user with a number of alternative algorithms for translating inventory data into attainment measures for each resource goal (visual quality, wildlife, water, wood production, and general ecological objectives). For example, the following metrics are possible for evaluating water quality:

• Meet Best Management Practices
• Provide Intensive Protection of Water Resources
• Provide Intensive Protection of Wetlands
• Provide Protection of Riparian Areas
• Enhance Habitat for Warm Water Fish
• Enhance Habitat for Cold Water Fish

Decision Support

Definition of management interventions

Define what is available for the manager to intervene in the forest: time of harvest, plantations, thinnings, reconversions... Existence of prescription writer, simple enumeration of all possibilities, scenario simulation , etc.

Typical temporal scale of application

Define the temporal scale of the application: E.g., operational and immediate level, Tactical planning (short term) and strategic level.

Types of decisions supported

• Management level
  • strategic decisions
  • administrative decisions
  • operating control decisions
• Management function
• planning decisions
  • organizing decisions
  • command decisions
  • control decisions
  • coordination decisions
• decision making situation
  • unilateral
  • collegial
  • Bargaining / participative decision making

Decision-making processes and models

• Logic modeling
• Operations research modeling
  • Direct approaches
  • Heuristic manipulation of simulation models
• Business modeling
• Simulation (with and without stochasticity)
• Multiple criteria/ranking
• Other

Output

Types of outputs

RESULTS?

Besides the showed results in the own application, it includes some data export functions; and the capability to create some third-party external models for the FVS growth simulator and for the SVS data visualization package.

Spatial analysis capabilities

NED analysis itself is not spatially explicit, but it does include a function to export data summarized as attribute layers to ArcMap.

Abilities to address interdisciplinary, multi-scaled, and political issues

• [Evaluate interactions between different basic information types (biophysical, economic, social)] * [Produce coordinated results for decision makers operating at different spatial scales]
• [Facilitate social negotiation and learning]

System

System requirements

• Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows 2000, XP
• Other software needed: The inventories input data file format is .mdb, a Microsoft Access database, although MS Access being not required to run NED. For the third-party external models, external software such as FVS, SVS or ArcGIS is required.
• Development status: version 2.0 is now available.

Architecture and major DSS components

The software interface is written in C++ and uses Prolog components to manage the knowledge bases and the handling of third-party external models, such as the FVS growth simulator, the SVS data visualization package, and ArcGIS.

Usage

• The primarily application of NED software is among private consulting foresters in the eastern United States, where regular users number in the hundreds. The software is also used extensively in forestry classrooms in colleges and universities.

Computational limitations

• You cannot have more than 99 plots in any stand.
• You cannot have more than 999 records in one cluster.
• You cannot have more than 1350 records for stems >= 1 inch dbh in the overstory and understory combined.

User interface

Describe the quality of user interface and the Prerequisite knowledge for using the system

Documentation and support

Describe the connection to Help-system and possibilities for assistance, as well as the required training and user support levels

Installation

• Prerequisite knowledge: Level of effort to become functional
• Cost: free to download at the NED website

References

External resources

Web page: http://nrs.fs.fed.us/tools/ned/products/ned2/

REYNOLDS K.M., TWERY M., LEXER M.J., VACIK H., RAY D., SHAO G,. et BORGES J.G.: Decision Support Systems in Forest Management IN BURSTEIN F. et HOLSAPPLE C. W. (EDS.) (2008): Handbook on Decision Support Systems 2: Variations. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 800 pp.