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| In a nutshell... Guidance is a modern, sophisticated system for providing changing plans for the wildlands of Ft. A.P. Hill. Computer-produced to incorporate the best knowledge based on current research and expert experience, the system creates syntheses for specific sites. Probably the first website wildland management planning system, it provides backups and in-depth instructional documents, references, and a glossary, along with optimization. Beyond analyses and description, beyond forestry, the system is created for sustained wildland benefits and a well-functioning ecosystem through products and services of many types. Benefits are maximized and costs minimized, subject to achieving, legally, an expected, above-bank-interest-rate-annually for 150 years (with computations sliding forward annually). Sensitive to community and diversity needs, there are other constraints that are part of the complex objective. Recommendations or prescriptions (guidance) used along with expert, on-site observations tend to assure superior environmental management. |
There are several concepts of what plans are or should be. These concepts range from plans being brief sweeping statements of intentions, to coordinating and communicating measures, to detailed prescriptions of essential actions, even to guidelines for implementing them. All are influenced by past practice, available resources, and ideas and conditions when the work was begun.
A new synthetic concept is available. It is called the guidance system concept. It is observable in the system called Guidance.
Because planning is poorly defined and because there are many concepts surrounding it (over 30), an alternative phrase is needed for a new system that deals with the desired future and how reasonable people may get to it in practical, cost-effective ways, and to find it satisfactory. The phrase is "guidance system". It has an analogy in manned space craft guidance systems. "Mission control" provides the major support and direction, the guidance, but the men and women of the craft make the decisions in the actual situation at the time. The guidance received may be identical to their decision but they have the options as well as responsibility for the decision. The system described herein provides guidance for decisions.
Guidance is a system, a composite of people, facilities, computers and its operating system, printers, and ancillary equipment, work processing software, statistical software, geographic information system software, unique analytical and expert system algorithms, and carefully-crafted text files. These all operate together as a system to produce a guidance document on the Web (but also available in paper form), also part of the system. It may be a document or map when printed, but it may be an image on a screen or signals being sent by wire or satellite. While there are similarities between the document and a "plan", the differences are so great that to call it a plan is not appropriate. Other people have described systematic planning and have laid out the steps required to prepare a plan and have called this work a planning system. That also is so different from what is involved in Guidance that it is a misnomer.
Guidance is a very large concept and it is currently being expended and improved by adding text, models, and optimization routines. Its creation is an on-going effort.
The basic concept of the guidance system, over simplified, is of a conventional (1995) work-processing system with a large text file. A second file exists composed of words and numbers. A "merge" command enters all of the words and numbers from one file into the proper places in the other file. Other refinements add tables, graphs, and maps. Other refinements allow parts of the text to be suppressed when they are irrelevant to a particular area. The major file of words and numbers for an area is created by local observers, citizens, resource managers, and other relevant people. Data bases are searched (e.g., wildlife occurrence) and these findings are brought into the file. Optimization analyses are made and their "answers" become part of the file, then are placed within explanatory text. The text may become available from the internet.
A dynamic, real-time system on the computer is needed to provide advice, information, and screened suggestions to responsible decision makers working with large, complex, natural resource systems. Guidance is evolving to become that system.
There is a real need to change the planning process. The view of Guidance staff is that there are opportunities for an enterprise to establish success and leadership in effective, cost-conscious planning.
Guidance aids decision makers by:
Objectives
Guidance starts with a positive concept of objectives. These are statements such as:
There are many more. These are suggestions to show the pattern. They are achieved simultaneously since many actions achieve (or not) many objectives.
The "plan" seeks to achieve all or most of them cost-effectively over time. The professional seeks techniques; the citizens participate, with help, in stating the objectives as precisely as possible.
Citizens then (for public land work) or owners:
A score, R, is computed and steps are suggested for how to improve the R "score", showing possible ways to reach R*, the optimum condition. Overall scores for the land are computed under varying conditions, thereby allowing comparisons to be made among the present condition, the proposed condition, past conditions, and the optimum condition of the area. Parallel computations are given for likely current financial profits using several discounting procedures. The score, R,can be posted on site for how well a job is performed - what its consequences are toward achieving the best score, R*. This constitutes a type of "seal of approval" and can be used in press releases, etc., as in the field on a standard "Tree Farm"-like sign. Annual superior performance awards can be presented based on best scores during the year for timber harvests and other major land-use change.
Specific objectives are presented within the system itself but they include the general ones of conservation, diversification, sustainability, and wise use over the long run.
More Detail
The system actively does (or attempts to do) the following, making it (collectively) unique::
At least these are the concepts and areas of work...and evolution is underway. Comments and assistance are welcomed.
Guidance has first been designed to provide new decision making power to owners of land in the mid-Atlantic region. The land has a wide variety of social and economic characteristics and problems that make it extremely suitable to serve as an area for testing, development and demonstration.
The system helps to solve many major problems of forest management and will provide site-specific answers in other conflict areas. It increases the efficiency and quality of decision making, thereby providing substantial cost and time savings to land owners throughout the region. In planning economies alone, the benefits of the system are expected to exceed by far the costs of its development and operation.
The system produces (1) tabular, statistical, and other analyses; (2) legal, regulatory, and policy texts; (3) summary information; (4) impact analyses or consequence reports; (5) optimum solutions to multiple-use problems; and (6) comprehensive plans, all with graphics and maps. It provides a stable resource in the face of potentially changing consultants and staff personnel, and offers continuity in knowledge of the local ecosystem and management policies.
Guidance integrates concepts of ecology, economics, esthetics, and energetics in a multi-dimensional approach to solving major, complex land use problems through a centralized, comprehensive data base. The primary products of the system are reports, answers, maps, and other output that will show in a variety of ways the consequences of any major land use act, such as a timber cut, a new road, a mine, etc., and do so in terms of all aspects of the primary and secondary factors impinging on the action. The consequences of various types of approaches are traded off and combined in Guidance to expand and enhance multiple-use and ecosystem-management decision procedures.
The system that is still under development (and hopefully will always be developing and improving) encourages the union of expertise from the field, business, government, and from industry, all directed towards the benefit of the natural resources contained on the land. The unique combination of private groups and land owner that is expected to develop from this undertaking has the potential of reducing conflicts, and encouraging cooperative efforts.
Guidance provides an alternative to the stresses of the conventional 10-year plan. The Guidance concept is that a book may be produced that looks like a conventional "plan." The difference is that the new plan plan is a dynamic, vital planning system, the total computer system that can produce a document on demand. The total plan is a function of the latest data added to the system, the latest solution algorithm, or the latest editing. The plan is no longer the book but the system that produces it.
Guidance describes the area as it is desired and for which planning should be done, the description of the area as it exists, and then the estimated difference and how to reduce that difference. These are the elements of modern planning. Of course, cost estimates are provided, including the essentials of discounting them to "present values."
Guidance addresses:
There is an emphasis on:
Guidance is designed to extract increasing quantities of benefits from a decreasing acreage of high quality natural resource lands. The system is a means by which research findings are carried to the land.
Guidance has an approach that goes beyond being "an ecosystem perspective", while excellent, and is expanded to a simultaneous five-way perspective of (the 5-E's): (1) the ecosystem or an ecological perspective; (2) economics or human value systems that are inseparable from the components of the ecosystem; (3) energetics, fundamental to both, but looming, as never before, as a major determinant of ecosystems and the well-being of humans; (4) esthetics or those poorly-defined but undoubted aspects of forests, wildlife, wilderness, etc., for which people will lay down their very lives; and (5) enforcement, the social context of life within the law.
Guidance may become the major practical functional mode of knowledge dissemination. "The publication", once the only major option, might pale as a means to get findings out into practice onto thousands of acres of forests and associated lands. The busy forester needs little more information; all suffer an information explosion; all have educational limitations, synthesis is needed.
Alternative analyses of long-term plot data for wildlife population potential trends are now available and, once completed, can be used within Guidance. The planned 5-year plot inventories of the U.S. Forest Service will greatly augment their usefulness. Yield curves (familiar in forestry but a concept readily transferred to ponds, lakes, streams and any land unit, etc. etc.), provide a means for describing transition in each resource component of the land system and for estimating potential future production as a result of action on the land, planned or not.
The GIS capability of the system will be one of the only ways feasible to select sites for sampling for studies or using results to manage sites for threatened and endangered (T and E) species. Time and area constraints on uses as produced in prescriptions by the system can eliminate major conflicts with these T and E species.
Wetland maps will be created. These, with their associated data bases (approximately 100 map-units in a GIS), may become the primary grounds for forested wetland research.
A wilderness unit has improved methods and information for assessing and managing wilderness resources, uses, and values.
The "landscape perspective" allows off-site factors (e.g., "nearness-to" values, interspersion indexes, edge ratios) to be loaded onto each mapped site for optimization. The system is designed to take, and it needs, the improve quantification of a set of named factors that can substantially improve decisions for the land owner.
In more general terms, Guidance is an honest, open way to think together and then act to improve conditions for everyone over the long run. It is the best known way to take what we know now and use it to reduce conflicts and mistakes and to try to balance conditions so they will not worsen. It is a human system with frailty but with means and a pattern for corrections and improvements. It doesn't make decisions; it only provides advice or guidance so that the more-encompassing decision-maker may decide, including all subtleties, nuances, and insights of the moment of risk.
The system provides a program as well as criteria for creative opportunities for the resources that allow use and protection while fulfilling legislative, regulatory, and policy requirements and addressing local, regional, national, and international issues (e.g., migratory birds).
The system, because of staff work, is believed to be consistent with international laws, policy, and regulations; to meet national and state needs; and also to provide local guidance, for example, at the large-land-ownership level.
It has parallels in requirements voiced in the U.S. Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act (RPA) as amended by the National Forest Management Act. It is consistent with environmental impact assessment procedures throughout most of the world. These are related to the requirements of the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the implementing regulations [36 Code of Federal Regulations 219].
The planning system is continually undergoing accounting and extreme tests of validity. Objectives are relatively stable but evaluated every 5 years. Each major part of the system is reviewed periodically by a recognized evaluator and an accounting report filed. An open request is extended for suggestions for additions and improvements. These are for additions and improvements. These are all evaluated at least monthly by the system staff. A formal process has been created for an "appeal to change" a part of the system. This is a public review process, separate from the legal system, but as step 4 of the process, the courts become involved.
Plans typically take the form of "if you do this then that will happen." The thought and analyses behind the entire process -- from deciding what is needed to how to achieve it -- is very difficult. It is easy for people to be trapped into believing that because some action is prescribed that it will be carried out -- and done properly. Prescriptions often are not carried out. There is no money, no expertise, natural catastrophe - many reasons. Another option, of course, is that there is inaction, incompetence, or misuse of funds or resources. Feedback in the improving planning system seeks to separate these two types of failure. The public and evaluators of the planning system must be on guard -- the system itself may be at fault (giving poor prescription) -- but the other reasons that resources are not protected or not providing returns cost effectively may be found elsewhere.
Guidance presents positive statements about all resource uses and users assuming practices are carried out as regulated under various contracts, regulations, policies, and laws. The consequences of a fully developed forest and stand management system (and usually 1-2 next-best alternatives) are presented. The messages contains information on "growing and nurturing" as well as harvest and shows net consequences to clean water, wildlife habitat, and amenity values.
The vision of "new forestry" (and later ecosystem management for the AFS and SFI is consistent with many dimensions of Guidance and includes:
Rather than "establishing a "baseline" of forest practices and applications of BMPs [best management practices]" Guidance searches through thousands of options to select best possible tactics for each site or stand (to include not only ecological variables but also distance to markets, urban encroachment, etc.). The power of computer mapping, massive data bases, and rapid searching techniques allow this previously-impossible work. Rather than "on average" treatment of the land, Guidance allows unique prescriptions. The unique, site-specific work may result in advancing the perception of the forest industry as environmentally responsive. Staff of Guidance has and will continue to consult with forest industry and USFS individuals on the pattern and means to improve the algorithms and analyses.
This planning process embodies the concept that the area and its resources should be managed as a total system. It favors an ecosystem approach but attempts to expand that beyond the ecosystem to the total human system and its subsystem. There has been an evolution of attitudes and values of people about how their lands, both public and private, should be used and managed. In some cases the changes have come at great conflict and cost. Shifting values have resulted in strongly-held attitudes about objectives grouped as commodity or non-commodity. Other shifts have occurred in willingness to take risks, in the definition of the "long run" (an appropriate planning horizon), and the responsibility to future generations of people (the intergenerational conflict).
Within Guidance is a response to these shifts and a move from a "single-commodity" or "dominant-resource" basis of planning to that for total human system. Of course it includes major commodities and resources, but also includes (with tradeoffs, balance, mixes, and optimization) other resources of equal or greater value to some people such as viewscapes, recreation opportunities, cultural and historic sites, groundwater, soil, wood, wildlife, and minerals (Clark and Brown 1990).
Not just the natural environment is the topic of this system. Of course forests, air, and water are important environmental topics but the concern is for the quality of life thus the quantity and quality of things that affect that life, and these include protecting scenery; gaining clean air and water; gaining relief from noise, congestion, and monotonous city scapes; and having space for active outdoor recreation and the full concept of re-creation and high-level human health in pleasant surroundings (Stover 1972).
This planning system reduces risk for citizens. It harvests the investment in and results from millions of dollars spent on natural resource research. It develops new procedures for modeling large complex system. It attempts to include all of the natural resources.
Planning is, by nature, a resolution of conflicts. What may seem good for people in general often creates difficulties for individuals. In a country where freedom and independence are highly prized, people encounter increasing limits such as the trivial ones of staying on the right side of the road but also the more serious ones of not polluting the neighbor's land or allowing disease to spread.
Within this planning system an effort is made to achieve the greatest possible freedom of action and uses of resources of the total land and resource system while protecting the land for future use and protecting neighbors and neighboring land. It is not a preservation system (although some preservation ideas are present) but a comprehensive use and management system, one that achieves citizen objectives subject to perceived natural laws and legal limits. It attempts to take into account, simultaneously, the regional and global environment, economic issues, energetic issues, as well as those both historical and cultural.
Some parts of the planning system are descriptive and are presented to provide the information and background for user so they may have a common undertaking of the basis for the statements and conclusions. Past plans that have been very brief have usually failed. It is a dynamic entity within a computer, and it may be changed when the environment, objectives, or policies change. It may be changed when research yields new knowledge and when economies of operation are found. The document system is long. Very long plans have also failed because people did not read them. In this system it is possible, because of computer aids, to move around within the text system, skipping parts, getting text for small sections, getting the entire document printed, or reading it from a computer screen.
Critiques of other planning efforts (Larsen et al. 1990) have been studied and within the guidance system these have been (and are continuing to be) addressed. Needs include (and we believe response has been made within Guidance):
The task is very great. The effort, however, is essential because of the influence of decisions. If efforts are not made to estimate future conditions, then the likelihood of being prepares for them will be small. We will allocate scarce resources poorly today for the future and they will seem wasted when viewed from that vantage point. Clearly, conditions are changing as well as human values and expectations. A dynamic system responsive to those changes and to others is badly needed. Guidance is just such a response. Comments, advice, and financial support are needed so that it may be continually improved. Additional concepts for Guidance are available.
A plan for the plan, for Guidance, can become as large and complex as one for a large building. Buildings are not inspected and approved (or disapproved and scrapped) at the end. By analogy, I hope we can consider planning units, the "bricks" of the system, that can be approved and put in place, and some of the problems avoided. I would suggest "phases" but this implies a sequence. I merely suggest units that may be developed simultaneously and discussed and approved. This may prevent the enormous losses, costs and delays, in present land use planning approach. The units may be large or small; many will overlap. Only as a suggestion, there may be those related to objectives, safety, vandalism, budgets, species (bass, deer, etc.) trails, law enforcement, staff ... almost any topic ... without taxonomic purity or parallelism. There has to be a way to get out of the present procedure with its costs and frustrations and to create a positive, cooperative, constructive system in which citizens have opportunities to achieve benefits at reasonable costs from their lands and waters. To these ends, a start has been made.
Correspondence about the planning system should be sent to R. H. Giles
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Last revision January 17, 2000.