Tackling the Challenges of Environmental Complexity: A Complex Fuzzy Rough Set Approach to Ecosystem Management

Management of ecosystems is currently one of the most difficult areas in decision-making concerning the environment since it involves biological systems, human activities, and other environmental factors. The nature of ecosystem data is complex and uncertain, and since environmental systems are constantly evolving, robust mathematical models are required for efficient decision-making support. This chapter presents a new strategy to address these environmental challenges by proposing the complex fuzzy rough set theory to design new sophisticated aggregation operators. We propose four innovative operators: The novel operators include complex fuzzy rough Dombi power averaging (CFRDPA), complex fuzzy rough Dombi power weighted averaging (CFRDPWA), complex fuzzy rough Dombi power geometric (CFRDPG), and complex fuzzy rough Dombi power weighted geometric (CFRDPWG). These operators are particularly tailored to address the specific requirements of ecosystem data by efficiently managing fuzzy rough information in MCDM issues. The integration of Dombi operations with complex fuzzy rough sets improves the operators’ ability to identify uncertainty and complicated dependencies inherent in ecological systems. Based on these operators, we construct an integrated MCDM method for environmental decision-making situations involving fuzzy rough data. The applicability of our approach is illustrated through an extended case study that deals with the choice of the best forest management policies. This chapter demonstrates that the proposed framework handles the complexity of the ecosystem management decisions, the uncertainty of data, and the existence of multiple stakeholders and interdependencies. Moreover, we perform a detailed comparison of our proposed approach with other existing methods in environmental decision-making. The results show that our framework outperforms the other approaches in addressing the issues of complexity and uncertainty in ecosystem management problems. This comparative study confirms the theoretical benefits of the proposed approach and demonstrates its practical relevance to enhancing the quality of environmental decision-making.