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How Can We Make Progress with Decision Support Systems in Landscape and River Basin Management? Lessons Learned from a Comparative Analysis of Four Different Decision Support Systems

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Abstract

This article analyses the benefits and shortcomings of the recently developed decision support systems (DSS) FLUMAGIS, Elbe-DSS, CatchMODS, and MedAction. The analysis elaborates on the following aspects: (i) application area/decision problem, (ii) stakeholder interaction/users involved, (iii) structure of DSS/model structure, (iv) usage of the DSS, and finally (v) most important shortcomings. On the basis of this analysis, we formulate four criteria that we consider essential for the successful use of DSS in landscape and river basin management. The criteria relate to (i) system quality, (ii) user support and user training, (iii) perceived usefulness and (iv) user satisfaction. We can show that the availability of tools and technologies for DSS in landscape and river basin management is good to excellent. However, our investigations indicate that several problems have to be tackled. First of all, data availability and homogenisation, uncertainty analysis and uncertainty propagation and problems with model integration require further attention. Furthermore, the appropriate and methodological stakeholder interaction and the definition of ‘what end-users really need and want’ have been documented as general shortcomings of all four examples of DSS. Thus, we propose an iterative development process that enables social learning of the different groups involved in the development process, because it is easier to design a DSS for a group of stakeholders who actively participate in an iterative process. We also identify two important lines of further development in DSS: the use of interactive visualization tools and the methodology of optimization to inform scenario elaboration and evaluate trade-offs among environmental measures and management alternatives.

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Acknowledgments

The work was partly funded by the Helmholtz Programme “Terrestrial Environmental Research” (Seppelt and others 2009). The projects FLUMAGIS (project ID FKZ 03300226) and Elbe-DSS (project ID FKZ 0339542A) were funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF) in Germany. The research on CatchMods has been assisted by the New South Wales Government (Australia) through a grant from its Environmental Trust. The authors are thankful for the cooperation and assistance of staff from the NSW Environmental Protection Authority. The research project MedAction was supported by the European Commission under contract EVK2-2000-22032: www.riks.nl/projects/medaction.

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  1. Department Computational Landscape Ecology, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

    Martin Volk, Sven Lautenbach & Ralf Seppelt

  2. Research Institute for Knowledge Systems, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Hedwig van Delden

  3. Integrated Catchment Assessment and Management Centre, Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Lachlan T. H. Newham

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  1. Martin Volk
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Correspondence to Martin Volk.

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Volk, M., Lautenbach, S., van Delden, H. et al. How Can We Make Progress with Decision Support Systems in Landscape and River Basin Management? Lessons Learned from a Comparative Analysis of Four Different Decision Support Systems. Environmental Management 46, 834–849 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-009-9417-2

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