NED - Spatial Decision Support Knowledge Portal

NED
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NED is a collection of software tools created to help resource managers develop goals, assess current and future conditions, and produce management plans for forests in the eastern United States.

Overview

The NED concept is to use an original prescription design system to incorporate management goals for multiple objectives, analyze current forest conditions, recommend management alternatives, and predict future conditions under different alternatives. NED's core outputs include an evaluation of goals, for any or all of five resources: visual quality, wildlife, water, wood production, and general ecological objectives. NEWILD describes the habitat conditions used or preferred by 338 vertebrate species in New England (and has been adapted for other locations). A user may provide NEWILD with a description of habitat conditions and determine what species might be likely to use the area or ask the program to identify the habitat preferences of a particular species of interest. Wildlife goals in NED are specifically habitat-oriented and do not attempt to address population density directly. The user may specify a goal of enhancing the diversity (species richness) of wildlife on a forest property, or select one or more species for which to enhance, maintain, or create habitat. For example, one landowner may wish to increase the abundance of ruffed grouse for hunting. Another may wish to increase the variety of songbirds or amphibians by providing a variety of habitats required by different species.

Source Of Description

IUFRO-2003: \ NED-2: An Integrated Forest Ecosystem Management Decision Support System,\ by M. Twery, H.M. Rauscher, P.D. Knopp, S.A. Thomasma, D. Nute, W.D. Potter, F. Maier, J. Wang, M. Dass, H. Uchiyama, and Astrid Glende, in Proceedings of the 2003 IUFRO International Conference on Decision Support for Multiple Purpose Forestry, Vienna, Austria, April, 2003. [http://www.cs.uga.edu/~potter/dendrite/]

URL

http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/burlington/ned (No Longer Available)

Description Of System Components

The Forest Stewardship Planning Guide helps the user through a process of selecting forest stewardship goals, makes limited recommendations on how to manage a forest for specific goals and describes the conditions that must be created or enhanced to accomplish them.

NED / SIPS provides an effective means of creating, managing, and analyzing forest inventory records at the stand level. The user may apply any of a set of standard treatments to the stand or design a customized cutting scheme, and utilize one of the four incorporated stand growth simulators to show what the stand may look like in the future.

NEWILD evaluates the habitat suitability of stand inventory data by comparing them to a set of species/habitat matrices.NED-Health estimates [how?] the negative and positive effects of numerous insects and diseases, along with detrimental aspects of adverse weather, logging damage, animal grazing, and air pollution. NED-1 evaluates how a management unit as a whole, or an individual stand, may provide conditions required for specific goals (aesthetics, ecology, forest health, timber, water or wildlife.)