A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol

Abstract

Expert judgement informs a variety of important applications in conservation and natural resource management, including threatened species management, environmental impact assessment and structured decision-making. However, expert judgements can be prone to contextual biases. Structured elicitation protocols mitigate these biases, and improve the accuracy and transparency of the resulting judgements. Despite this, the elicitation of expert judgement within conservation and natural resource management remains largely informal. We suggest this may be attributed to financial and practical constraints, which are not addressed by many existing structured elicitation protocols. In this paper, we a..