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Contemporary land managers are beginning to understand that landscapes of the early 20th century exhibited complex patterns of compositional and structural conditions at several different scales, and that there was interplay between patterns and processes within and across scales. Further, they understand that restoring integrity of these conditions has broad implications for the future sustainability of native species, ecosystem services, and ecological processes. Many too are hungry for methods to restore more natural landscape patterns of habitats and more naturally functioning disturbance regimes; all in the context of a warming climate. Attention is turning to evaluating whole landscapes at local and regional scales, deciphering their changes and trajectories, and formulating scale-appropriate landscape prescriptions that will methodically restore ecological functionality and improve landscape resilience. Here, we review published landscape evaluation and planning applications designed in EMDS. We show the utility of EMDS for designing transparent local landscape evaluations, and we reveal approaches that have been used thus far. We begin by briefly reviewing six projects from a global sample, and then review in greater depth four projects we have developed with our collaborators. We discuss the goals and design of each project, its methods and utilities, what worked well, what could be improved and related research opportunities. It is our hope that this review will provide helpful insights into how spatial decision support technologies may be used to evaluate and plan for local and perhaps larger-scale landscape restoration projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Core design components of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support system were used to develop and implement the integrated restoration and protection strategy of the Northern Region of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Scenarios that spatially optimized hazardous fuel reduction, protected developed recreation values, and improved watershed conditions are presented to illustrate how the evaluation and decision modeling capabilities of the decision support system can be used sequentially in both strategic and tactical planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]