Journal article
Allocating conservation resources between areas where persistence of a species is uncertain
E McDonald-Madden, I Chadès, MA McCarthy, M Linkie, HP Possingham
Ecological Applications | Published : 2011
DOI: 10.1890/09-2075.1
Abstract
Research on the allocation of resources to manage threatened species typically assumes that the state of the system is completely observable; for example whether a species is present or not. The majority of this research has converged on modeling problems as Markov decision processes (MDP), which give an optimal strategy driven by the current state of the system being managed. However, the presence of threatened species in an area can be uncertain. Typically, resource allocation among multiple conservation areas has been based on the biggest expected benefit (return on investment) but fails to incorporate the risk of imperfect detection. We provide the first decision-making framework for con..
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Funding Acknowledgements
Law enforcement data for this report was supplied by D. Martyr from Fauna and Flora International. Comments by P. Baxter improved earlier versions of this manuscript. This work has been supported by INRA, MASCOS, and ACERA (I. Chades), Applied Environmental Decision Analysis Centre (I. Chades, H. Possingham, E. McDonald-Madden, M. McCarthy), an ARC Federation Fellowship (H. Possingham), the Invasive Animals CRC within the Detection, Prevention and Mitigation Program (E. McDonald-Madden), and a MYQRS scholarship from the University of Queensland (E. McDonald-Madden). We thank three reviewers for their comments on this manuscript.