All management activities at least potentially have environmental consequences, which may be either positive or negative. Whereas status assessment focuses on the current state of a landscape, impact assessment is typically either retrospective or prospective. As a further distinction between status and impact assessment, the former typically only describes the current state with no direct implications concerning causality, whereas the latter assumes causality. For example, if a certain management activity (or set of activities) has been in place for some period of time, then a retrospective impact assessment might attempt to draw conclusions about the management actions and the observed environmental consequences. If we are interested in various potential alternative management actions, then the impact assessment is prospective in the sense that we are trying to predict the expected consequences of alternative actions. Prospective impact assessments of alternative management activities usually are directly involved in evaluation of alternatives in a classic planning process.
Graphical Ontology Browser
- Click on a node to jump to the content of that node
- Pan to see the rest of the graph
- Scroll the mousewheel up and down to zoom in and out
- Rearrange the nodes in the graph by dragging a node to a different position