Improving Natural Resource Management (PDF)

The decision to implement environmental protection options is a
political one. These, and other political and social decisions
affect the balance of the ecosystem and how the point of
equilibrium desired is to be reached. This book develops a
stochastic, temporal model of how political processes influence and
are influenced by ecosystem processes and looks at how to find the
most politically feasible plan for managing an at-risk ecosystem.
Finding such a plan is accomplished by first fitting a mechanistic
political and ecological model to a data set composed of
observations on both political actions that impact an ecosystem and
variables that describe the ecosystem. The parameters of this
fitted model are perturbed just enough to cause human behaviour to
change so that desired ecosystem states occur. This perturbed model
gives the ecosystem management plan needed to reach desired
ecosystem states. To construct such a set of interacting models,
topics from political science, ecology, probability, and statistics
are developed and explored.

Key features:

* Explores politically feasible ways to manage at-risk
ecosystems.

* Gives agent-based models of how social groups affect ecosystems
through time.

* Demonstrates how to fit models of population dynamics to
mixtures of wildlife data.

* Presents statistical methods for fitting models of group
behaviour to political action data.

* Supported by an accompanying website featuring datasets and
JAVA code.

This book will be useful to managers and analysts working in
organizations charged with finding practical ways to sustain
biodiversity or the physical environment. Furthermore this book
also provides a political roadmap to help lawmakers and
administrators improve institutional environmental management
decision making.