Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process for Decision-Making in Ecosystem Management

Many decision-making situations involve preferential selection among some finite set of alternative items or events or courses of action. For a land manager, the list of alternatives might contain possible timber harvest levels, inventory and monitoring activities, or watershed analyses. Under ideal circumstances, there might be some intuitive measurement scale (e.g., cost) that a manager could use to compare competing alternatives. The best choice among the available alternatives then would have a high (or low, for cost) score along that scale. By ranking alternatives on the basis of numerical scores, we create an implied priority for those alternatives. When the selection criterion is “least cost” for example, the measurement scale is obvious and choosing among the alternatives is easy. In most real-world situations, however, there is often no single, simple scale for measuring all competing alternatives. More often, there are at least several scales that must be used and often those scales are related to one another in fairly complex ways. In broad-scale, participatory decision-making, alternative courses of action arise from different stakeholders with different value systems, and yet this diversity must be accommodated and integrated.