Louis Gross
Friday, October 17, 2008 - 2:30-3:00
To effectively manage natural reserves, resource managers must prepare for future contingencies while balancing the often conflicting priorities of different stakeholders. To cope with these issues, managers may employ models to project the reserve response to different scenarios that represent alternative management plans or environmental forecasts. Scenario analysis is often used to rank such alternatives to aid the decision making process. However, model projections are subject to uncertainty in assumptions about model structure, parameter values, and environmental conditions. In the face of environmental, social, and political, challenges, there is a need for efficient strategies for dealing with these uncertainties. To address this, we describe a systematic approach for quantifying the impacts of uncertainty on scenariobased management policy. We use relative assessment to quantify the impacts of uncertainty on scenario ranking. We illustrate our approach by considering uncertainty in parameter values and input data on climate, with specific examples drawn from the Florida Everglades restoration project.
Keywords: Global Conservation Issues