AM in practice

Overly harsh ... ?

2012-01-27T12:08:00.000-06:00

As I reflected further on the Molano-Flores and Bell paper I realized that I had forgotten to say what I liked about their paper. I liked that they used 16 different climate model projections to get a sense of how uncertain those projections are.

Space-Time!

2012-01-27T12:01:00.001-06:00

A problem that I am particularly fond of is allocating monitoring effort to maximize one's ability to detect a trend. Jonathan Rhodes of the University of Queensland just sent me a recent paper with Niclas Jonzen where they examine what the best distribution of samples is in space and time when the degree of spatial and temporal correlation in population dynamics varies. Very nice stuff.

Predicting the future ... its harder than it looks.

2012-01-26T12:29:00.000-06:00

Brenda Molano-Flores and Tim Bell just published a paper in Biological Conservation that uses count based PVA and linear regression models to evaluate the effects of climate change on an endangered plant. Land managers primarily collect population counts to track rare plant population trends. These countbased data sets are often used to develop population viability analysis (PVA) to

Ooops

2012-01-25T09:50:00.002-06:00

How can journalists make such whoppers as this statement: The survey, conducted under contract by Kelton Research, asked multiple-choice questions via the Internet of 1,000 people ages 16 to 25, selected to be nationally representative, with a 95 percent confidence level. uh, 95% confident to what level? 2 percent? 5 percent? I suppose you could work it out from the sample size, lets see:

Protecting the new arctic ocean

2012-01-25T09:09:00.002-06:00

This is probably a good idea. As permanent Arctic sea ice retreats, fishing opportunities that have previously been unavailable will start. The sooner we get started on setting up an international agreement to manage that fishery the better. I'm a little agnostic on the tone of the letter putting the need for science at the front. I'd say much more important is to get the social control system in

The word sustainable is unsustainable!

2012-01-23T08:41:00.003-06:00

This is also an excellent demonstration of the perils of extrapolation. Just to be clear though, I extrapolate alot - it is often necessary when predicting the future ...

Putting up a new umbrella

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000-06:00

Sarah Michaels and I published a brief piece last year in which we outlined our argument for a new umbrella term within which to discuss risk and uncertainty: indeterminism. As more and more organizations with responsibility for natural resource management adopt adaptive management as the rubric in which they wish to operate, it becomes increasingly important to consider the sources of

Not gracefully aging

2012-01-19T16:27:00.001-06:00

I've discovered that I'm in the midst of a premature "Philosopause", which according to Anne Soukhanov is defined as: a point at which a researcher, weary of or frustrated by rigorous laboratory-based science, begins to look for nonscientific, philosophical explanations instead William Reiners and Jeffery Lockwood, in their book "Philosophical foundations for the Practices of Ecology", take

AM for non-game species

2012-01-19T15:44:00.004-06:00

A few years ago Mike Runge from the USGS used a series of the Adaptive Management Conference Series meetings to see if Decision Theoretic AM could be applied to threatened and endangered species. That effort eventually lead to the development of the Structured Decision Making workshops and courses now regularly offered at the National Conservation Training Center. Although it has taken us a

Data sharing ethics

2012-01-13T10:20:00.001-06:00

Andrew Gelman has a new column in Chance magazine on statistical ethics. I like his take on data sharing as an ethical responsibility: ... sharing data is central to scientific ethics. If you really believe your results, you should want your data out in the open. If, on the other hand, you have a sneaking suspicion that maybe there’s something there you don’t want to see, and then you keep your

Making predictions profitable?

2012-01-11T11:13:00.000-06:00

My colleague Scott Field, who wrote all of my best papers that weren't written by my wife, asked me if I have an opinion about predictions markets like this one. And, other than knowing that they exist, I hadn't. But despite myself I became intrigued, and after a bit of reading I'm even more intrigued. So I became a member of Intrade to see what its about. I think the only way to tell if it is

More from Ken Williams

2012-01-10T06:00:00.000-06:00

At least within the decision theoretic school, Ken Williams has been setting the stage and defining the terms for a long time. In a very recent contribution (I'd say his most recent, except that I wouldn't be surprised if he's produced something else since) he discusses the concepts related to making decisions with uncertain objectives. Here's the abstract: This paper extends the uncertainty

Eliciting and valuing information

2012-01-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

Before you can value information you have to have it, and Mike Runge, Sarah Converse, and Jim Lyons provide a superb example of expert elicitation from a structured decision making workshop on managing the eastern migratory population (EMP) of whooping cranes. They calculate the partial expected value of information for each of 8 hypotheses about why the EMP is experiencing reproductive failures,

AM Entrepreneurship?

2012-01-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

There's been much talk here at UNL about "entrepreneurship" - social, business, intellectual, you name it, its all about being entrepreneurial. So I found the notion of a "policy entrepreneur" very intriguing, and a connection to AM in the title of this article was all I needed to take the time to skim through it. Disappointingly, the connection to AM was flimsy and inconsequential, and solely

Valuing Information

2012-01-05T14:30:00.000-06:00

Information, we all want more of it to enable better decision making, but how much should we pay for it? There are always costs involved in getting more information - real monetary costs, as well as lost opportunities. Ken Williams, Mitchell Eaton and David Breininger recently published an article outlining in detail how to calculate various forms of the value of information. Here's the abstract:

2011-12-20T16:57:00.000-06:00

My strongest memory of New Zealand’s South Island, unfortunately, will be driving two fisted, white knuckled down narrow streets twisting over insanely steep mountains, and crossing one lane bridges. Did I mention New Zealand is a country where high octane fuel is available at every pump? I finally realized that the “keep left” signs weren’t meant for foreign tourists, but rather Kiwis

Schooling again

2011-12-19T16:51:00.000-06:00

It seems pretty clear that the term “Adaptive Management” has gone the way of “Sustainable Development” – it’s popular so everyone wants to do it, and as a result there is a proliferation of interpretations of AM. Rather than waste time arguing over whose interpretation of AM is the right and true path, Jaime McFadden and I tried to identify attributes of different interpretations, and then

End of the story

2011-12-08T19:49:00.001-06:00

I’m outta here, they are talking about effectiveness monitoring again. Although it is an interesting dataset - snares found per km walked in a forest park in Rwanda. Looks like they need to control for observation effort - otherwise the ranger posts are attracting snares.

Big Partnerships

2011-12-08T19:43:00.001-06:00

Kim Lutz … or no, some other person talking about Environmental Flow Prescriptions: an adaptive partnership This is a pilot project partnering with USACE on retiming flows from dams – gee, where have I heard that before. They want to get both high peaks and subsequent low discharge periods as well. At least one of the projects has peak flows < 1 kcfs, so … although it looks like they include

Redefining Adaptive Management

2011-12-08T19:24:00.001-06:00

Welcome to the first LIVE blog direct from the Epsom 3 room at the Skycity convention center in Auckland. This is a special session redefining Adaptive Management organized by Craig Groves and Jensen Montambault from The Nature Conservancy. Definitions are good, so I’m looking forward to adding a new school of thought to my pantheon. I’m sitting here with Mike Runge (USGS), waiting eagerly to

Congressing

2011-12-06T16:37:00.001-06:00

I'm fortunate enough to be down in Auckland NZ this week for the International Congress on Conservation Biology. This is the first of the new bi-annual format meetings of the Society for Conservation Biology. So far, I've not been blown away by anything, but its fun to catch up with people. I've run into alot of people from my time in Oz, which is harder to do at conferences in North America.

Not predicting the future

2011-11-04T13:14:00.002-05:00

I came across the following quote in an old USFWS report today: In essence, then, mathematical models applied to real-world situations can be used only as a tool to guide management decisions having future effects on an ecosystem. In contrast, models cannot be used to tell a manager what the future will look like. Say whut?!? How can you do the first without doing the second? Can someone explain

Ignoring the evidence?

2011-10-25T10:36:00.002-05:00

A big part of what I call the "Decision Theoretic School" of AM focuses on using models to predict future outcomes. However, before you can predict the future, you have to fit the models to existing data, and that's what Skalski et al (2011) did in a very nice article demonstrating the use of population reconstruction methods for age-at-harvest data on American Marten in Michigan. This approach

The need to include parameter uncertainty

2011-10-24T12:10:00.003-05:00

One of the themes in Population Viability analysis that's been echoing around for a bit is the distinction between sampling variability and environmental variability in vital rate estimates. For instance, if you measure reproductive output for Piping Plovers over 5 years, the variance in reproductive output includes two components - variation between years due to environmental and biotic

The need for theory

2011-09-27T11:02:00.002-05:00

hmmm, that doesn't rhyme quite as well. Ben Bolker brought the following quote from Efron and Tibshirani (1986; "Bootstrap methods for standard errors ...") to my attention: An important theme of what follows is the substitution of computing power for theoretical analysis. This is not an argument against theory, of course, only against unnecessary theory. I've often thought of the need for

Wolf Management reprise

2011-09-06T11:16:00.002-05:00

On The Wildlife Society Blog Michael Hutchins criticized Deborah Peter's article in the Huffington Post on the current wolf harvest. One section in particular emphasizes why wolf management will be political, not scientific, and thus not a good candidate for AM:I hate the fact that Congress intervened in the ESA with regard to wolf management. Management and conservation should be in the hands of

Making Decisions is hard!

2011-08-22T12:23:00.003-05:00

Yes! making decisions is hard, and it saps brain energy, which in turn reduces self control! Eat chocolate before crossing the Rubicon!

Info gap uncertainty

2011-08-17T14:02:00.003-05:00

You can't imagine how dreadfully unhappy I was to discover that not all uncertainty could be handled with probability, even subjective probability. My (former) student Max Post van der Burg wrote a paper on one approach to handling this type of uncertainty in structured population models, using the info-gap terminology developed by Yakov Ben-Haim. Yakov describes the approach in a book, which is

Schooling one's thoughts

2011-08-17T13:52:00.002-05:00

Quite a while back Jim Peterson (now at Oregon State), started me thinking about similarities and differences between approaches to Adaptive Management. One of my students, Jamie McFadden, took on this idea and conducted a small review of published AM studies, which is now available as "Evaluating the Efficacy of Adaptive Management Approaches: Is There a Formula For Success?". In it, Jamie

Conceptual models

2011-08-16T09:45:00.003-05:00

Kate Buneau of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories sent the following link:Cool Conceptual Model DiagramWay complicated, but I love the way the different links light up when you mouse over a node. Positive and negative influences indicated with different links and symbols where the link reaches its target. I'm reminded of a quote that Stephen Pacala gave in his talk - I can't remember the

Horn tooting

2011-08-10T12:01:00.005-05:00

One of the things I've been interested in for quite a while is making decisions with poor or no information - what social scientists since Keynes and Knight call uncertainty, meaning that there are no probability distributions available for the outcomes. If we're being honest with ourselves, this characterizes alot of circumstances when dealing with endangered species management. In such

Quote of the day

2011-08-08T11:28:00.002-05:00

From Stephen Pacala's MacArthur lecture this morning: Never have so many been asked to predict so much while knowing so little ...He was referring to the models he works on to provide ecological feedbacks to global climate models. He also gave an excellent discussion of some situations where ecological models have been used to support policy decisions, and identified some attributes of the

It's values folks .... values all the way

2011-08-02T08:05:00.004-05:00

Dr. John Marburger, former science advisor to the Bush Administration, was often castigated by the science community for Bush administration policies on things like stem cell research. He passed away at the age of 70 yesterday, and in his obit in the Washington Post there was this quote:“No one doubts stem cells are valuable to research and hold tremendous promise — on that, there’s no scientific

Tooting one's own horn

2011-07-28T15:15:00.002-05:00

A few years ago ... well OK more like six ... Mike Runge of the USGS gathered a group of regular attendees to the Adaptive Management Conference Series with a number of USFWS employees who had ... issues. Three of them, in fact, and the goal was to see if the sort of quantitative decision theory approaches developed for the Mid-continent Mallard Harvest could be applied to endangered species. It

Why we should lead with values, not facts

2011-07-22T09:26:00.003-05:00

Over the past couple of years I've had some major paradigm shifts. One of those relates to the value of science in debates - recognizing that sometimes, no amount of science is enough. I just read an article by Chris Mooney in MotherJones.com reviewing some very interesting research on how political values affect how we perceive evidence. I've quoted the last few paragraphs below to give context

Expert Blogging

2011-05-05T09:23:00.002-05:00

I recently wrote a few lines about the need to be able to identify expert bloggers to help non-experts weed out bad information in social networks. There's an interesting article in today's Financial Times on the effect of social networking on access to information. If you're like me, and you don't have a subscription to FT, you can read the excerpts and additional commentary by Roger Pielke, Jr..

Wise decisions and predictions

2011-05-04T10:59:00.003-05:00

Daniel Sarewitz is a leader in the Science-Policy interface area, and last year he had this to say in an opinion piece in Nature last year:

Bigger models not needed

2010-04-12T16:06:00.003-05:00

Skip Stiles worked many years as a congressional staffer, and by his own admission, wished for better climate change predictions. He seems to have seen the light, as highlighted in this guest post at Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog. He is responding to the recent announcement of a $50 million multi-agency program to fund the development of better climate models. While I agree with Stiles that the

Welcome to the cyborg planet!

2010-04-12T15:08:00.002-05:00

Human Landscapes is an intriguing blog that I follow from time to time. This post on bringing nature in to create a cyborg planet is intriguing. Myself, I'm not sure more information about the planet is going to help, as long as we humans can't agree on what we want the planet to provide.

The AM process

2010-04-07T14:54:00.003-05:00

A colleague, who may prefer to remain nameless, suggested that this comic be used as the primary diagram for the AM process:

Leverage points

2010-04-07T14:01:00.005-05:00

Kelly, a commenter on an earlier post, pointed out Donella Meadows "Leverage Points: places to intervene in a system" paper. This is sort of a layperson's guide to "systems theory", but cast in a way that highlights the effectiveness of pushing on different points in a system. I find much to recommend this list: