Decision support for natural resource management; models and evaluation methods

When managing natural resources or agrobusinesses, one always has to deal with autonomous processes. These autonomous processes play a core role in designing model-based decision support systems. This chapter tries to give insight into the question of which types of models might be used in which cases. It does so by formulating a rough categorization of decision problems and providing many examples. Particular attention is given to the role of statistical learning theory, which may be used to replace mathematical modeling by training with examples