Decision making process - especially in natural resources management,
encounters myriad of challenges to objective decisions, significant decision depends on
amount of information and capability of decision makers to handle massive data. In
forest management, these challenges such as lack of enough data and cost associated
with obtaining insitu spatial data, have been minimised with the use Geospatial
Decision Support System (GDSS). GDSS has shown great capability of capturing,
storing, analysing, retrieving and manipulating data for aiding spatial decisions. This
technology proliferates quickly and as a result decision makers overlook other systems
for forest governing. Following this situation, people living adjacent to forests have
found it difficult to accessing forest resources - and their livelihoods, which depends on
forests have been compromised. The continuing degradation of forest resources despite
existence of different management strategies - such as (community based forest
management and joint forest management), has made it necessary to assess decisions
on forest conservation. Focus Group Discussion (FGD) strategy was applied to
capture extent of use of Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) and GDSS in forest
management decisions, observation was applied to implicitly relate the narration from
FGD and the reality while interview method was applied to forest officials to capture
use of ILK in forest decision making. The results revealed that ILK related to forest
management; however the uncovered ILK has been insignificantly used together with
GDSS in making decision for conservation. This paper establishes the ignorance on
ILK as one among other factors behind the continued forest cover depletion despite
existence of conventional conservation strategies. The developed framework integrates
GDSS and ILK to aid forest decisions which will ensure sustainable forest
conservation and serves for forest needs of the communities adjacent.