OVERVIEW

INFORMS is a decision support framework designed specifically for the Forest Service IBM platform. The acronym comes from "Integrated Forest Resource Management System." INFORMS was engineered to support planning tasks associated with watershed and project-level planning, and is used to assist forest/district-level users in resource project management to make decisions following the NEPA process.

The INFORMS interface is built primarily upon ArcView, with additional Oracle Forms as needed to support needed functions. Some custom (i.e. , non Oracle Forms and non ArcView) windows within INFORMS are used when neither Oracle nor ArcView could support the needed functionality.

The underlying Oracle data structure behind INFORMS supports numerous planning functions, including the ability to:

Support the entire NEPA process and improve decision quality and quantity.
Capture and isolate project or decision support data sets from corporate spatial and attribute databases.
Define project team members and define their access to INFORMS functions Access and run a range of analytical tools such as models, scripted queries, Arc Macro Language routines, and rulebases (a knowledge base component) eg., FVS.
Build and retain project alternatives via ArcView themes and Oracle datasets.
Track progress on projects on decisions via access to an event log or analysis record.

Analytical tools used in INFORMS will vary from site to site since users at each site determine the suite of tools they wish to integrate within INFORMS. This can include information needed to make analysis accurate and site specific.