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Decision Support Tools

ESSA has a rich history of developing a wide range of highly innovative data driven decision-support solutions. Our tools support real-time decisions, balance ecosystem trade-offs, transparently track assets, reduce risks, and save lives.

Decision support tools enable more timely and better decisions, promote transparency, increase efficiency, codify state-of-science knowledge, track the status of assets, and some even save lives. For high-stakes decisions that need to be made repeatedly or involve “arithmetic” that is complex or time consuming, there are substantial benefits to moving beyond a one-time analysis or a ‘report’ to create an interactive tool.

A decision support tool can be many things: a simulation model to explore effects of alternative management strategies on performance indicators, a real-time forecasting system, a hand-held mobile application that provides alerts to hazards, a geospatial data visualization tool or report card, a data and information management system or statistical modules for estimating salmon harvest. The range of tools and applications are infinite.

Our staff have many years of experience in the design, development and application of decision support tools for effects analysis across a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial resource management problems. A key feature of our approach and success is blending subject matter expertise over multiple disciplines and coupling submodels and tools.

As shown below, we build tools that are durable, with highly intuitive user interfaces by working closely with our clients during all stages of design, development, testing and training.