Values compatibility analysis: Using Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) for decision support in national forest management

Human values are embedded in forest management decisions but are rarely systematically and explicitly included in the decision process. National legislation for public lands often provides conflicting goals but little guidance for agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service to operationalize public value preferences. The historical difficulty of integrating public values into forest management decisions includes the problems of measurement, aggregation, and tradeoff analysis. In this paper, we present a method for measuring and integrating spatially-explicit public values collected using public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) into a decision support framework we call values compatibility analysis (VCA). We provide a case study to demonstrate how spatially-explicit public values can be used to determine the compatibility of designating ATV/OHV routes on national forest land. The applications and limitations of VCA for decision support are elaborated and we conclude that an effective decision support framework should provide some degree of standardization, be broadly inclusive, and provide the opportunity to engage in systematic place-based value trade-off analyses