Knowledge elicitation tools for use in a virtual adaptive environmental management workshop

Adaptive environmental management (AEM) deals with the complex interactions of social, environmental, and economic systems, and incorporates the knowledge, values and opinions of many stakeholders and experts. AEM has traditionally been centered on a structured series of workshops to define possible management actions and the indicators used to assess the actions, and generally leads to the construction of a model for exploration of the management options in a consensus-building exercise. There is an optimal group size for the workshop process; however this limits the ideal of including all stakeholders in the process. There are also time and cost constraints on the workshop approach. A new approach to the AEM process has been developed based on the concept of a virtual meeting space, in which stakeholders and experts can interact in a distributed system development process over an extended period of time. The AEM system is based on Java applets, which interact over the world wide web. These applets function as graphical knowledge elicitation tools. A standalone version run on a laptop computer by an extension specialist permits use in situations where there is no Internet access, or by individuals or groups who do not have the required computer experience.