Failure to build consensus amongst stakeholders has been a primary obstacle barring progress in developing and implementing strategies to manage sudden oak death (SOD). Consensus as to the goals of in situ management of SOD has rarely been reached, because stakeholders’ visions of success vary widely and often compete with each other across the complex landscape of forest resources, ownership types, and overlapping jurisdiction in which this epidemic unfolds. Investments in research on the pathology of P. ramorum have yielded dynamic spread models identifying and ranking communities at risk. However, unresolved questions regarding the efficacy and costs of proposed management, as well as the degree and location of collective action needed to affect change, has worked against deploying management treatments. The lack of shared and articulated goals, uncertainty in effect, and misunderstanding as to the roles of individuals and institutions in controlling the disease has left much of the region vulnerable to ongoing forest loss.

We introduce Tangible Landscape, a participatory modeling tool designed to explore “wicked” socioecological natural resource dilemmas by providing a “smart” workbench for consensus and collaborative solution building. Tangible Landscape allows stakeholders and decision makers to gather around a geographically realistic model and explore scenarios with instant feedback as to impacts of their decisions. Coupling a scanner, a projector, and a GIS, Tangible Landscape 1) builds participant understanding of complex environmental systems and the models that simulate them using 3D visualizations; 2) allows participants to iteratively test personal management strategies by computationally “steering” simulation models using an intuitive, tangible interface; 3) provides datadriven, near real-time spatio-temporal projections of management outcomes including costs; and 4) promotes co-learning amongst participants who are also testing their own strategies.