In this introduction to the following series of papers on Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) we briefly summarize BBNs, review their application in ecology and natural resource management, and provide an overview of the papers in this section. We suggest that BBNs are useful tools for representing expert knowledge of an ecosystem, evaluating potential effects of alternative management decisions, and communicating with nonexperts about making natural resource management decisions. BBNs can be used effectively to represent uncertainty in understanding and variability in ecosystem response, and the influence of uncertainty and variability on costs and benefits assigned to model outcomes or decisions associated with natural resource management. BBN tools also lend themselves well to an adaptive-management framework by posing testable management hypotheses and incorporating new knowledge to evaluate existing management guidelines.