RangeCon: a management evaluation system for assessing success of selected range improvement practices
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Decision support systems are currently used in range management to help ranch managers and agricultural agency personnel make strategic resource management plans. Individual management skills and managerial environment have not been considered when predicting biological and economic response to range management practices. Risk for individual managers adopting unsuited technology in relation to managerial ability needs to be factored into decision support systems. A knowledge-based system (RangeCon) was developed to evaluate managerial skills, a firm's management environment, and technical complexity of the improvement practices to assess whether appropriate technology has been matched with a manager's abilities. Seventeen attributes were derived from a hierarchy of domain experts, including one primary expert and two secondary experts who were interviewed personally, and 80 agency/academic and rancher tertiary experts interviewed by questionnaire. Responses from the tertiary experts were used to assign weight to values of the object/attribute/value triplet. Face validation method was used to compare the system's performance to expert opinion. -Authors