Why Is The Encyclopedia Helpful?

Due to the fragmented and decentralized nature of forest science knowledge, a new approach to scientific knowledge delivery to users is badly needed. An overwhelming body of knowledge on forest ecosystems in the United States exists.  However, this knowledge is not readily accessible nor useable for resource managers because most of it resides in university or government libraries in the form of primary research papers. The encyclopedias in the Forest Encyclopedia Network address the need for more accessible, understandable, and condensed research knowledge. The Encyclopedia Network synthesizes and integrates available research on forest science in a hyperdocument-based encyclopedia system accessible over the Internet. The encyclopedias contain original summaries of hundreds of topic areas compiled from thousands of literature sources. By synthesizing the available research on forest ecosystems, the encyclopedia network provides a framework for organizing existing knowledge and for improving access to that knowledge.

Forest science has been practiced in the United States since the late 19th century.  Despite the accumulation of a very large body of research knowledge, a huge gap exists between what scientists know and what the management community is able to apply on the ground. Most research knowledge is neither easily accessible nor readily useable because it has not been synthesized and integrated into a coherent, meaningful knowledge structure.  In most cases, this knowledge base retains the fragmented nature of the many separate publications that compose it. Consequently, what should emerge as an integrated and coherent body of knowledge appears instead to managers as disconnected pieces of the whole that they need for applied problem solving.  The current poorly organized system of information almost guarantees that knowledge is lost, misplaced, and continually recreated.  Because land managers deal with forest resources in aggregate, they need knowledge that captures the integrative nature of ecosystems and management.  Moreover, as natural resource management moves from a difficult multiple-resource management paradigm to an even more difficult ecosystem management paradigm, the need for better and more powerful knowledge management aids has become more urgent.

Making scientific knowledge accessible to a wide variety of potential users in a timely and cost-effective manner has always been a problem for the natural resource research community. We have tried many different approaches to solving this problem but none have been entirely satsifactory to date. The root cause that makes solution of this problem so difficult is that (1) scientific knowledge is extremely fragmented and decentralized in numerous peer reviewed journal articles of various importance and quality (2) the language of science is necessarily difficult for non-researchers to understand (3) there are very few scientists in relation to a much larger user community and (4) scientists are not institutionally rewarded for using more than a tiny fraction of their available time for "technology transfer" activities. These elements are all part of the scientific paradigm and are very unlikely to change in the near future. Therefore, a new approach to managing scientific knowledge, that helps both producers and consumers of this knowledge, is badly needed.