Digital Government: Harvesting Information to Sustain Our Forests

Oregon Health & Science University, Portland OR

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-99083518 Delcambre, Lois M. Oregon Graduate School Digital Government: Harvesting Information to Sustain our Forests Historically, forest management practices have 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. This research will be a collaboration between the university research team and the Adaptive Management Areas program, a multi-agency initiative (USDA Forest Service, and two agencies of the US Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service) 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. A key technical question is to what extent "superimposed information" (information overlaid on the base set of resources) can help realize these goals. There is particular interest in thematic organizations based on terminology in common use in the forest practices domain, and in the ability for arbitrary users to augment the system with their own annotations, linkages and collations that might be of use to others.