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Västerby outdoor recreation centre, located in Raseborg, southern Finland, is a 1,500 ha haven of peace enjoyed by a diverse range of users and nature enthusiasts all year round, including skiers, kayakers, hikers, berry pickers – truly highlighting the Everyman’s Right and picturing this perfect Finnish landscape. Västerby is also one of Raseborg Stad’s cradles of green bioeconomy, and is governed by Raseborg City Forest Plan 2024-2035, which includes a logging strategy for 20 hectares of monoculture planted spruces.In 2024, a collaboration between Novia University of Applied Sciences and Raseborg Stad was then initiated to mitigate the negative effects and boost positive effects of the logging. The Case Västerby project investigates alternatives for forestry interventions and water management. The goal is to create stocks with higher biodiversity without compromising too much on economic returns, and to minimize the impact on watercourses throughout the area.To harmonize this plethora of interconnected and overlaying interests, services and actors, it would seem natural to work with a sophisticated spatial decision support system (SDSS), notably fed by geographic data, geomatics, and models, and automated with artificial intelligence, however, this project has proven that it is not necessarily the only way. While our DSS does exhibit the usual quantitative and qualitative methods, its set-up produced a totally unexpected result: the creation of a knowledge/excursion hub and destination where the user became the student, the defender, the steward, the advocate. SDSS does not need to be overly complicated to work, as a plain but original combination of methods, models and data delivered through simple but co-designed channels can also support wise and efficient decision-making.