OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEM-DESIGN FOR NATURAL-RESOURCE DECISION-SUPPORT - THE NORTHEAST DECISION-MODEL

The Northeast Decision Model (NED) for forest ecosystem management uses object-oriented design to maintain a consistent user interface while incorporating management goals for multiple objectives, analyzing current forest conditions, specifying recommendations for management alternatives, providing silvicultural prescriptions, and predicting future conditions under different scenarios. The prescription process in NED incorporates knowledge from experts in many disciplines into an integrated knowledge base to identify desired conditions for the forest ecosystem. This object-oriented design is constructed within a consistent, portable, graphical user interface and around several key tools for managing the many bits of information needed to produce silvicultural recommendations for forest ecosystem management. These tools include a data manager, inference engine, geographic data handling system, and hypertext system for user help and explanation. The knowledge bases needed for NED include description and quantification of desired conditions, analysis of current conditions, and prediction of future conditions. Integration of these know ledge bases into a consistent user interface through the use of an underlying object-oriented class structure is a design element of NED that may be useful to developers of other decision support systems.