EMDS integrates state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) as well as logic programming and decision modeling technologies on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) to provide decision support for a substantial portion of the adaptive management process of ecosystem management.
The DecisionPlus component prioritizes landscape features with respect to user-defined management objectives (e.g., watershed restoration), using summarized outputs from NetWeaver as well as additional logistical information considered important to the decision maker(s).
Some major new features were added between v5 and 8.7 (see Frontiers in Environmental Science): EMDS was originally developed by the United States Forest Service.
Support and development of EMDS was then transferred to Mountain View Business Group where one of the principal programmers was able to find a new home.
An area of immediate interest for further research and development based on this new expertise is the possibility for implementing natural language generators in EMDS that can interact with the analytical products and maps from NetWeaver and CDP, and render all of this complexity into easy-to-understand executive summaries.