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A Total Forest Management Plan and Wildland Management Decision Support System
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The Analytical and Design Structure for Rural Systems

Like architects that seem to see everything as form or function, I think everything in rural land management can be seen as analysis or design. Simplisticly, you either take something apart and describe it or you put something together to make it perform in some way. I lay aside, for the moment, analysis and relegate it to studies and research, to the people answering questions and developing the inputs for decision making. It is vitally important that we design well for it will expedite and clarify analyses and reduce their enormous costs for scant payoffs. It is vital to design well for the results will literally produce the environments within which we and our children and fellow citizens will live for the next several hundred years.

The three major aspects of design are structure, dynamics, and relations. Structure is the topic of the form, the parts, the nominal things --- things often similar but different enough to demand comment, attention, or action. Simple differences are clear to everyone but for design, differences have be substantial enough to justify them being noted. They'll be in a computer system someday and someone will want to know what to do with them -- what values to use, what differences in decisions they might make. If no one knows one effect that adding (or removing or not removing, i.e., retaining) plant or animal PQ will have in a system, then it cannot be a part of design work. We are analyzing but here, only for the purpose of design, thus the reverse flow suggested in the above box.

We may quibble over whether every living thing, every rock stratum, every land form should be listed and included within a system being designed. We've tried and failed, even when we were "rich." That is enough of an excuse for not continuing to do so. We can make lists of plants and animals and "things" and lists are necessary for some computations such as diversity indices. Lists themselves have value to some people. They are thus a product of a rural system. Let us recognize this, make listing a separate activity, and the list itself a separate item in the structure of the system being designed. There are many years ahead before every item in such lists will be a computational feature in an operating system.

Dynamics and relations will be discussed later. The first major element of structure is System Context.

System Context

Land use planners, ecologists, and natural resource specialists of all types have struggled with the boundary problem, knowing and specifying the limits of a problem, knowing where to "draw the line." There is always in a design problem the questions of outside influences, how far to go, how much can we afford, how inclusive??? There is no satisfactory simple answer. The answer is that the bounds or the outside limits need to be seen as the context of the design, specified early, communicated frequently throughout the design work, and expansion entrances or nodes planned. This idea is no more complex than building a house with joints and support structures prepared to take the beams for the planned expansion. The system context within the rural system is always tentative. It may be expanded or contracted at designated times and points (e.g., budgetary). There must be specified period or system designers will suffer if a system context is expanded too rapidly or before they are prepared. System shrinkage can have similar effects, often lowering morale and causing the appearance of wasted prior work.

The system context is the named, marked, mapped or listed topic of work. It is always too large or too small. It has to be seen as tentative. It is an effort, a psychological state, that is unsettling for many people. There have to be limits to work, but they are temporary. The so-called "ecologist" calls a pond an ecosystem but immediately is confounded with whether precipitation and weather systems need to be included in that small simple system that is mapped. What are the pond limits? From how far might the nutrients and toxic substances in ground water be carried. Mark the pond edge at the high water mark? The low water mark? The moist soil limit? Include the watershed? The latter questsion expands the scope of designing a pond system far beyond "the pond." Perhaps only to the outer edge of the riparian zone around the pond? Specifying the system context is a difficult tentative human decision with temporal and related limits (budgets, staff, equipment, etc.)

For the typical county, the context for the rural system is all land and water within the legal county boundary and outside of any land or structures typically viewed as that of the town, village, or city. It is a volume and includes the space 1 mile above and 1 mile below the typically-mapped land surface and includes all of the conventially known biotic and abiotic structures,processes, and relations. Once "wildlands" was thought to have descriptive use but failed when tested by words and phrases such as " fallow fields," ," pastures and rangelands," " parks and picnic areas," " commercial campgrounds," and " aquaculture ponds," The word " rural," quite encompassing, may be excessively so, but seems appropriate as the context for designing practical systems operating within a county ... then expanding.

Structural Components

The US Forest Service staff has struggled with the features of importance and with which they must deal on public lands. I have expanded that list to include the important structural conponents needding working systems. The list is long, but it will not get shorter over time. Major decisions have hinged on the ability to understand and predict the changes in each component over time as a result of natural conditions or as a result of proposed managerrial action. The mappable list, with

• numbers beside each in parentheses) indicating the minimum named parts or required values
• probable change over time (transition dynamic)
• probability of occurrence (including zero),
• modest current valuation and value-added assumptions,
• modest risk or probable failure to achieve the above values, and a
• 150-year planning horizon

implicit with each component:

1. Air quality
2. Precipitation (5; for example, rainfall, available moisture,snow, sleet, hail, fog drip)
3. Temperature (4)
4. Evapotranspiration amount (monthly)
5. Timber standing and now for sale this year
6. Timber standing and unlikely to be removed
7. Timber standing and for later harvest
8. Secondary forest products (5)
9. Forest fire probability
10. Runoff area quality
11. Stream water quality
12. Stream water quantity
13. Groundwater quantity
14. Aquatic life (10)
15. Landscape (5)
16. Energy collection surfaces
17. Notable scenes
18. Soil nutrients (3)
19. Soil texture (4)
20. Soil hazzard areas or exclusions
21. Cropland
22. Pasture and rangeland
23. Riparian volume
24. Structures and utility lines
25. Airports
26. Travel routes (human including roads and railroads)
27. Travel routes (major animal migrations)
28. Travel nodes
29. Mineral and coal mines
30. Oil
31. Natural gas
32. Vertebrate fauna species (100 x 50 factors)
33. Invertebrate species (500 x 20 factors)
34. Recreational opportunities (10)
35. Health status index
36. R* total system performance score (3)

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This Web site is maintained by R. H. Giles, Jr.
Last revision July 13, 2001.