Making Tough Choices: Picking the Appropriate Conservation Decision-Making Tool

Integrated Decision Making – The Choices

Making choices: the neurophysiology of visual-saccadic decision making.

Imagine the decisions you might make while playing a simple game like 'matching pennies'. At each play, you and your opponent, say the mathematician John vonNeumann, each lay down a penny heads or tails up. If both pennies show the same side, vonNeumann wins, if not, you win. Before each play, you have the subjective experience of deciding what to do: of choosing whether to play heads or tails....

Conservation decision-making in large state spaces

For metapopulation management problems with small state spaces, it is typically possible to model the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and find an optimal control policy using stochastic dynamic programming (SDP). SDP is an iterative procedure that seeks to optimise a value function at each timestep by trying each of the actions defined in the MDP. Although SDP gives the optimal solu...

Is conservation triage just smart decision making?

Conservation efforts and emergency medicine face comparable problems: how to use scarce resources wisely to conserve valuable assets. In both fields, the process of prioritising actions is known as triage. Although often used implicitly by conservation managers, scientists and policymakers, triage has been misinterpreted as the process of simply deciding which assets (e.g. species, habitats) wi...

Incorporating ecological functions in conservation decision making

Systematic conservation planning has become a standard approach globally, but prioritization of conservation efforts hardly considers species traits in decision making. This can be important for species persistence and thus adequacy of the conservation plan. Here, we developed and validated a novel approach of incorporating trophic information into a systematic conservation planning framework. ...