Decision making in land management involves preferential selection among competing alternatives. Often, such choices are difficult owing to the complexity of the decision context. Because the analytic hierarchy process (AHP, developed by Thomas Saaty in the 1970s) has been successfully applied to many complex planning, resource allocation, and priority setting problems in business, energy, health, marketing, natural resources, and transportation, more applications of the AHP in natural resources and environmental sciences are appearing regularly. This realization has prompted the authors to collect some of the important works in this area and present them as a single volume for managers and scholars. Because land management contains a somewhat unique set of features not found in other AHP application areas, such as site-specific decisions, group participation and collaboration, and incomplete scientific knowledge, this text fills a void in the literature on management science and decision analysis for forest resources.

Contributors. Preface. Foreword. Basic Principles of Decision Making in Natural Resources and the Environment; D.L. Schmoldt, et al. Fundamentals of the Analytic Hierarchy Process; T.L. Saaty. On Using the AHP in Multiple Objective Linear Programming; P. Korhonen, J. Wallenius. HERO: Heuristic Optimisation for Multi-Criteria Forestry Decision Analysis; J. Kangas, et al. Strategic and Tactical Planning for Managing National Park Resources; D.L. Schmoldt, D.L. Peterson. Combined Use of Goal Programming and the Analytic Hierarchy Process in Forest Management; L. Díaz-Balteiro, C. Romero. Efficient Group Decision Making in Workshop Settings; D.L. Schmoldt, D.L. Peterson. Prioritizing Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management: A Case Study on Participatory Decision Making; G.A. Mendoza, R. Prabhu. Integrating the AHP and HERO into the Process of Participatory Natural Resources Planning; J. Kangas, et al. Environmental Cognition: Contributions from the Analytic Hierarchy Process Toward Construction of Cognitive Maps; R. Banai. Potential Allowable Cut of Finland Using the AHP to Model Landowners' Strategic Decision Making; M. Pesonen. Applying A'WOT to Forest Industry Investment Strategies: Case Study of a Finnish Company in North America; M. Pesonen, et al. Prioritizing Salmon Habitat Restoration with the AHP, SMART, and Uncertain Data; K.M. Reynolds. A Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process for Assessing Biodiversity Conservation; G.A. Mendoza, R. Prabhu. Regression Methods for Pairwise Comparison Data; J.M. Alho, et al. Using GeoChoicePerspectives in Collaborative Spatial Decision Making; P. Jankowski, T. Nyerges. Integrating the AHP with Geographic Information Systems for Assessing Resource Conditions in Rural Catchments in Australia;R.M. Itami, et al. PastDevelopments and Future Directions for the AHP in Natural Resources; D.L. Schmoldt, et al.