Cross-scale integration of ecosystem services into forest planning: structural tensions in developing an integrated DSS

Forests are socio-ecological systems in which management decisions affect multiple ecosystem services simultaneously. This contribution presents an integrated, cross-scale decision support system (DSS) under development and iterative testing in the municipal company “Riga Forests” (managing ~60,000 ha), structured explicitly around a four-level adaptive planning cycle linking strategy, tactics, operations and learning. The central object of the contribution is this cross-scale workflow itself and the tensions that emerge when it is implemented in an organisation with a mature, high-precision timber planning system.

The DSS connects strategic definitions of goals, thresholds and assumptions (based on aggregated ecosystem service indicators), tactical landscape-scale zoning and scenario design, and operational stand-level decisions on specific forestry actions (including clear-cutting, selective harvesting, soil preparation and drainage), with an adaptive layer that compares planned, predicted and realised outcomes and updates models and assumptions accordingly. Conceptual impact models, action–impact matrices and dynamic transition functions link management actions to ecosystem service components including biodiversity, climate regulation, water retention and recreation alongside timber.

The main challenges discussed are structural rather than technical: integrating uncertain and coarse ecosystem service indicators with an already robust and trusted timber accounting system; aligning ecological process scales with planning and operational units; maintaining internal legitimacy when introducing less precise knowledge domains; and avoiding false coherence in integrated outputs. The contribution reflects on these tensions and on what “integration” realistically means in practice when DSS move from conceptual design into operational use.