Design of a Transactional Environmental Support System

Introduction

The strategic objective of TESS was “to design a decision support system related to environment and land use that will enable policy makers to integrate knowledge from the regional and local level into the decision making process, while also encouraging local people to maintain and restore biodiversity ecosystem services”. Specifically TESS aimed “to design an internet-based system capable of:

• 1.

  Delivering environmental decision support locally, to help local land-users make micro-assessment decisions that benefit incomes and biodiversity, in exchange for

• 2.

  A supply of monitoring data that will summate effectively for use centrally, in order to enhance information for government assessments”.

However, in order to provide monitoring data that covers the whole landscape systematically enough to summate for effective government planning, the system will need to be very useful for managers of farms, forests, fishing and hunting areas, gardens and council land, as well as for communities and their volunteers. Above all, a system must be intuitive to use in the context of other necessary tasks. The red, green and blue lines that denote potential spelling, grammar and other mistakes in Microsoft Word are good examples of such context adaptation, based on very extensive computing. In a TESS context, submission of a farm-plan might elicit a response “income will increase to X” but also colour a stream red to indicate likely excessive nitrate run off and flash field areas, such that if the cursor was moved over them a comment would read “Nitrate risk can be offset by increasing buffer strips to 10 m” or “90% risk of halving partridge population can be reduced to 10% by….” A system capable of providing baseline data for SEA and EIA, but also and especially of providing decision support locally for the simplest daily tasks would need to support operation at a variety of scales (See Table 1).