Decision Theory Based Monitoring Design for Freshwater Ecosystems

Abstract

An environmental monitoring design in general and a freshwater monitoring system in special focus on important variables of an ecosystem which give a decision maker the possibility to select different types of actions from the domain of decision. In this sense, a decision model is divided into the part of the decision maker and its environment. The preferences of the decision maker are modelled by preference structures. They cover outranking methods as well as methods of multi-attribute utility theory. Additionally, the decision maker’s indifferences have to be gained by setting up threshold values or more advanced methods like automatic classification and fuzzy logic. In this paper the water quality status of the Spree-Havel waterway is compared using different methods based on decision theory in order to find out sampling points with the highest level of environmental information. It can be stated that the suitability of these methods depend on the desired information content. On the one hand, a set of sampling points can be well-arranged in transitive relations like rankings or Hasse diagrams. On the other hand, pair wise comparisons may be helpful which are obtained by ELECTRE I.