Spatial Decision Support
System Partnership
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Local watershed management forms the basis for continued environmental improvement and economic development in the United States. Effective watershed management requires the integration of theory, data, simulation models, and expert judgement to solve practical problems and still provide a scientific basis for decisionmaking at the watershed level. Decisionmakers need more user friendly decision support systems to understand and evaluate alternative approaches.
A decision support system (DSS) is a suite of computer programs with components consisting of databases, simulation models, decision models, and user interfaces that assist a decisionmaker in evaluating the economic and environmental impacts of competing watershed management alternatives. A decision support system can assess and present information geographically, or spatially, through the addition of a geographic information system (GIS). One of the technical challenges in developing spatial decision support systems (SDSS) is linking models for all the various aspects of complex watershed systems to estimate the effect of management alternatives. The members of the Midwest Spatial Decision Support Partnership have developed the following framework to meet that challenge.