The Symposium on Systems Analysis in Forest Resources (SSAFR) is an international gathering that has been held every two or more years since 1975, will be held in August 2017 near Seattle, WA. Past symposia brought together decision scientists from around the world who studied forest systems with the goal of making better management and policy decisions. Common topics included harvest scheduling, spatial reserve design, wildfire management, wildlife management, invasive pest detection and control, forest ecosystem services, supply chain optimization for biofuel and timber and non-timber forest economics. The overarching link across these topics has been the use of operations research and decision theory to inform on-the-ground management as well as forest policy. The 2017 SSAFR is going to be unique in that it will bring together two traditionally disconnected disciplines both working on forest decision support systems: the remote sensing/geospatial informatics community and operations researchers. The former group is concerned with how to best collect and process data on forests and other resources, whereas the latter tries to optimize resource management given whatever data is available. Despite the obvious feedback between the two groups, so far they have generally operated separately from each other. In this symposium, we seek to study such questions as how to streamline data collection protocols of competing forest management objectives.
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