ROBUST DECISION‐MAKING UNDER SEVERE UNCERTAINTY FOR CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT

By Helen M. Regan, Y. Ben-Haim, B. Langford, W. Wilson, P. Lundberg, Sandy J. Andelman, Mark A. Burgman. 2005

433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In conservation biology it is necessary to make management decisions for endangered and threatened species under severe uncertainty. Failure to acknowledge and treat uncertainty can lead to poor decisions. To illustrate the importance of considering uncertainty, we reanalyze a decision problem for the Sumatran rhino, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis, using information-gap theory to propagate uncertainties and to rank management options. Rather than requiring information about the extent of parameter uncertainty at the outset, information-gap theory addresses the question of how much uncertainty can be tolerated before our decision would change. It assesses the robustness of decisions in the face of severe uncertainty. We show that different management decisions may result when uncertainty in utilities and probabilities are considered in decision-making problems. We highlight the importance of a full assessment of uncertainty in conservation management decisions to avoid, as much as possible, undesirable outcomes.

Subfields: Ecology, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e38c4143fb29055b08ad4c360786dd830540ef8

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Citations in the corpus

To sample or eradicate? A cost minimization model for monitoring and managing an invasive species (2008, background): “When uncertainty is accounted for in the decision-making process, the most robust decision is the one in which the possibility of an undesired outcome is the lowest (Regan et al. 2005).”
Making robust decisions for conservation with restricted money and knowledge (2008, neutral): “Given this lack of valuable decisioninforming data, the need to evaluate the impact of uncertainty on the performance of management options is considerable (Regan et al. 2005).”
Predicting species distributions for conservation decisions (2013, background): “3).”
Incorporating uncertainty and social values in managing invasive alien species: a deliberative multi-criteria evaluation approach (2011, background): “In fact, the consideration of uncertainty may lead to a different decision in managing environmental risks (Burgman et al. 1999; Regan et al. 2005 ).”
Economics of invasive species policy and management (2017, background): “The approach can account for multiple forms of uncertainty simultaneously (Regan et al. 2005; BenHaim 2006) and has been applied to designing cargo inspections to prevent invader introductions (Moffitt et al.”
Adapting to Climate Change: Climate prediction: a limit to adaptation? (2009, positive): “For instance, information-gap (info-gap) decision theory (Ben-Haim, 2006 ) has been applied to climate impact related areas such as fl ood management (Hine and Hall, 2006 ) and conservation management (Regan et al., 2005 ).”