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Case study: Overcoming challenges of integrating DSS in strategic collaborative forestry scenario development

Interim report: May 8th 2012.

Authors:

Dr. Valentina Ferretti, Istituto Superiore sui Sistemi Territoriali per l’Innovazione, Italy.

Dr. Luc Boerboom, University of Twente, Faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation, the Netherlands

Background of the case study: adapting planning through collaborative DSS development.

With increasing uncertainties about variables such as climate change, demographics, future forest functions, regular forest design planning across Europe, which takes place in about 10 year cycles, needs to be steered in a systematic way by longer term 30-50 year outlook. The concrete link to forest design plans is important because unless these plans change, adaptation to these new and uncertain conditions will not take place. Although individual forestry decision support systems exist, there is hardly experience about the collection of these systems into a collaborative process that leads to systematic development and choice of both vision and pathway scenarios as well as forest policy instruments and silvicultural measures, particularly considering various sources of model and decision uncertainty.

The Ministry of Environment of the German state of Rheinland Pfalz (http://www.mufv.rlp.de/), wishes to develop and implement a multi-stakeholderk scenario development process, methods and tools to develop a 30-50 year outlook that guides the 10 year forest design planning. Initially only climate change shall be considered. In that sense this activity is a follow up from its KlimlandRP project (http://www.klimlandrp.de/). Together with the Forestclim project (http://www.forestclim.eu/) this development and implementation takes place between fall of 2011 and summer of 2012 in a project called Regionale Waldbauplanung Rheinland Pfalz – Regional Forestry Planning Rhineland Palatinate (ReFoRP). Stakeholders are experts from different sections in the ministry who have contacts with different external agencies and organizations.

Motivation for the case study: the difference a DSS makes.

The motivation for this mission is that the lessons learned in this process can be of great value to other forest management agencies facing similar need to strategically guide forest design planning and to developers of forest decision support systems in terms of:

• How a collaborative DSS changes the planning process.
• The embedding, i.e. choices made, of various decision support systems to address different planning and decision problems in the overall decision process.
• The strengths and weaknesses of existing DSS approaches as perceived by stakeholders and decision process “owners”.

Goal of the proposed STSM and its contribution to FORSYS objectives

The goal of the proposed STSM is to develop a case study report (STSM Scientific Report)describing

• the decision process development as well as the decision process;
• questions raised by different stakeholders;
• selection and embedding of a series of forestry decision support systems and methods (e.g. forest growth systems, forest function assessment, forest evaluation systems);
• strenghts and weaknesses of different decision support systems
• and a survey with stakeholders about experience and validity of the decision process and outcome.

Theory, methodology, concepts

This case study uses the following theories. methodologies and concepts. The central question is how does forest DSS get institutionalized in forestry practice. We turn to the field of Science and Technology Studies and in particular Actor Network Theory (Latour, Law, Mol, Braa, Sahay, and other authors). It sees technology as actor made up of a network of human and technology actors. We also use the concept of Thinklets (Briggs, Vreede) for collaboration engineering. A Thinklet A thinkLet is a named, packaged facilitation technique, captured as a pattern that collaboration engineers can incorporate into process designs. It combines technology with process. Finally we use case study methodology (Yin). As part of this case study we employ a survey to establish the actor network and implications for institutionalization.

Development process

The development process of this DSS has seen the following milestones

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April-May: theoretical, and methodological preparation and leveling off between collaborating researchers

June: STSM and survey, draft paper,

Sept- Oct: case study report

Nov-Dec: final paper