Two-step adaptive management for choosing between two management actions

Abstract

Adaptive management is widely advocated to improve environmental management. Derivations of optimal strategies for adaptive management, however, tend to be case specific and time consuming. In contrast, managers might seek relatively simple guidance, such as insight into when a new potential management action should be considered, and how much effort should be expended on trialing such an action. We constructed a two‐time‐step scenario where a manager is choosing between two possible management actions. The manager has a total budget that can be split between a learning phase and an implementation phase. We use this scenario to investigate when and how much a manager should invest in learnin..