Decision Support System for Biebrza National Park - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 442

3. Functioning of the system
The main idea for the development of the DSS for BNP was to centralize and automate the
organization, collection and processing of monitoring data in a comprehensive way. The
DSS is able to store data collected by permanent and periodical monitoring as well as results
of model computations. Thus it improves the analytical process performed by the BNP staff
or external users. For achieving these aims two assumptions were made: first, that an input
data to the system would be delivered from the different source (e.g. researchers, farmers,
tourists, students), and second, that input data would be stored exclusively in one place
using Internet. As it is shown on Figure 1, the input to the system consist of:


data collected by permanent and periodical monitoring conducted by BNP and other
institutions;

 reports, questionnaires and random observations of whole groups of system users;

 results of calculation of different models - hydrological, ecological and others which

use data from DSS.

Fig. 1. General system diagram
The main tasks of DSS is verification, formatting, storing, distribution and analyzing of data
considering the needs of the specific user. The user needs can be various and the system
should provide answers to users in an automatic or manual way depending on a queries
status - standard or non-standard. The standard queries are periodic activity reports like: list
of protected species or range of protection activities. An automatic process of other
nonstandard queries would be conducted depending on the needs of a user. However, it