Improving Natural Resource Management: Ecological and Political Models

Improving Natural Resource Management: Ecological and Political Models demonstrates how to find the most politically acceptable but effective plan for managing an at-risk ecosystem. Finding an effective plan can be accomplished by fitting political and ecological models to a data set composed of observations on both political actions that impact an ecosystem and variables that describe the ecological processes that are occurring within that ecosystem. The parameters of these tted models are perturbed just enough to produce desired ecosystem state endpoints, generating the ecosystem management plan needed to reach the desired ecosystem endpoints. Key features: * Looks at finding the optimum ecosystem management model * Case studies are introduced and feature throughout the book * Discusses political data collection in a wide range of circumstances * Introduces influence diagrams and stochastic differential equations * Supported by an accompanying website, featuring computer code and data used in the book, along with tutorials and solutions