Research and Publications
Bridging the Divide Between Science and Planning: Lessons From Ecosystems-Based Management Approaches to Local and Regional Planning in the United States
This report examines six ecosystem-based planning efforts across the U.S.: the Mission-Aransas Ecosystem Management Plan in Texas, community wildfire plans in Colorado, the Creating Resilient Communities project in South Carolina, the Pelekane Bay Watershed Restoration Project in Hawaii, the Long Island Coastal Hazard Mitigation Plan in Long Island, and the Sanford Conservation Plan in Maine. The report ferrets out six key lessons, including the importance of early stakeholder engagement, the value of earning credibility for the scientific and technical tools, and maintaining feedback loops throughout the process.
The key take-home lesson, though, is about politics: "understand that community planning processes are not exercises in abstracted rationality, but rather they are fundamentally political processes involving multiple parties with divergent interests. While it is important to find or develop strong data sources, to integrate effective ecosystem models, and to compare potential management scenarios, none of this matters much if the politics themselves aren’t aligned to adopt these scientifically based conclusions."
The Importance of Interoperating Tools for Ecosystem-Based Management: Best Practices and Next Steps
This white paper recommends best practices for Ecosystem-Based Management tool developers to help facilitate tool interoperability. Improving interoperability makes it easier for practitioners to more easily assemble a suite of tools optimized for a particular application, it reduces the cost of tool development and deployment, it increases productivity and efficiency, and it enables integrated analysis and decision-making across multiple scales, issues, and data types.
Tools for Community Design and Decision Making
Since the fall of 1998, the US Department of Energy has organized four national meetings on Tools for Community Design and Decision Making (TCDDM). The TCDDM meetings brought together community practitioners working in land use planning and community development; tool providers offering a wide spectrum of visualization, impact analysis, predictive modeling, and collaborative decision making tools; and foundations and public agencies working to advance more effective planning tools and process techniques.
The attached chapter was published in: "Planning Support Systems in Practice." Geertman and Stillwell ed.s. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg 2003
