PARTNERS: Shasta-Trinity National Forest, USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, University of North Carolina Asheville's National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC)

SUMMARY: The CRAFT toolset, designed primarily as a regional planning tool for use in a facilitated team environment, will be developed for application to complex spatial and temporal problems. CRAFT represents a synthesis of three overlapping approaches to managing risks and tradeoffs in natural resource management: ecological risk assessment, decision analysis, and decision protocols. CRAFT is a flexible framework to support planning, analysis, and decision making in most contexts and looks at competing risks and decisions based on this analysis. EFETAC and NEMAC personnel will serve as team facilitators that are familiar with CRAFT and by facilitating this process, EFETAC will be building the capacity of regional teams to make strategic decisions. In addition to improving end-user capabilities and expertise for comparative risk assessment, CRAFT aims to increase knowledge of risks and uncertainties related to ecological conditions and environmental threats.    

STATUS: Ongoing

PROGRESS: Several case studies have been identified to assist in the development of the CRAFT toolkit, which will soon be found at a newly designed website on the EFETAC webpage. This website will provide the CRAFT user an overview of the decision making process and will lead the user through an online CRAFT tutorial based on a recent research publication that illustrates the utility of Bayesian Belief Networks. In addition, this website will provide an entry into the CRAFT Wizard, a database-driven online CRAFT system that allows teams to proceed through the CRAFT process. The CRAFT Wizard provides questions to the team about problem objectives and alternatives, leads the group through creating a conceptual model of the problem, provides instruction on the development of Bayesian Belief Networks, and allows the team to gather and store crucial information and for the problem at hand. As the team proceeds, spatial and temporal datasets can be viewed through an online GIS viewer customized for the problem at hand. 

LINKS:

Shasta-Trinity National Forest

USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station

National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC) 

CONTACT:

• Jim Fox, NEMAC Director of Operations, jfox@unca.edu or (828) 301-2075
• Karin Lichtenstein, NEMAC Project Manager, klichten@unca.edu or (828) 250-3892