Optimization methods to solve adaptive management problems

Abstract

Determining the best management actions is challenging when critical information is missing. However, urgency and limited resources require that decisions must be made despite this uncertainty. The best practice method for managing uncertain systems is adaptive management, or learning by doing. Adaptive management problems can be solved optimally using decision-theoretic methods; the challenge for these methods is to represent current and future knowledge using easy-to-optimize representations. Significant methodological advances have been made since the seminal adaptive management work was published in the 1980s, but despite recent advances, guidance for implementing these approaches has be..