Decision Analysis For A Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society (DASEES)

U.S. EPA

Environmental decisions are often made without consideration of the roles that ecosystem services play. Most decision makers do not currently have access to useful or usable methods and approaches when they are presented with choices that will have significant ecosystem impacts. The goal of U.S. EPA’s Ecosystem Services Research Program (ESRP) Decision Support Framework (DSF) Team is to help provide that access by identifying and developing effective and user-friendly decision methods and approaches that empower decision makers to explicitly and routinely incorporate ecosystem services into their decision making. The ESRP DSF team hired Neptune to help them develop an open-source, web-based decision analysis framework called DASEES: Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society. To develop DASEES, Neptune integrated guidance and decision support tools to implement a five-step iterative Bayesian decision process:

Step 1 - Understand Context
Step 2 - Define Objectives
Step 3 - Develop Options
Step 4 - Evaluate Options
Step 5 - Take Action

DASEES was developed with stakeholder and decision-maker input, through case studies, to ensure the guidance, tools, and templates meet user needs and facilitate the incorporation of ecosystem services in the decision-making process.