A structured decision making analysis to increase a Red-cockaded Woodpecker population and balance stakeholder objectives for a National Forest

Structured decision making to navigate trade‐offs between multiple conservation values in threatened grasslands

“…SDM facilitates a genuine participatory approach for navigating complexity and providing stakeholders with a voice. The process helps to provide a clearer rationale for decisions and better understanding of the trade‐off process so that stakeholders are more comfortable with decisions, even if their personal preferences do not match the ultimate decision (Brown & Ferguson, 2019; Gregory & Keeney, 2002; Liu et al, 2012).…”

“…Reframing routine management decisions as problems to be systematically addressed is immensely useful (Árvai et al, 2014). A structured participatory process, such as that demonstrated here, helps to avoid cognitive biases (Hammond et al, 2003), facilitates complete expression of objectives and complete exploration and interrogation of management options, and provides an explicit and transparent approach to performing trade‐offs within an adaptive management framework (Brown & Ferguson, 2019). This process increases the likelihood of better decisions (Brown & Ferguson, 2019; Conroy & Peterson, 2013), it also builds collaborative links between managers and stakeholders at different levels, and fosters public confidence in management decisions that would otherwise be opaque.…”

Causal Bayesian networks in assessments of wildfire risks: Opportunities for ecological risk assessment and management

“…Causal models with BNs can provide powerful tools for evaluating causal questions in assessment and decision models for wildfire ecological risks (Landis, 2021). Many studies have relied on ecological risk assessments to inform mitigation planning and prioritization (e.g., Ager et al, 2007Ager et al, , 2010Kreitler et al, 2020;O'Laughlin, 2005;Stockdale et al, 2019) and have developed decision analytic structures with application to natural resource decisions (e.g., Brown & Ferguson, 2019;Keane et al, 2019;Marcot et al, 2012;Thompson et al, 2015). Risk assessments with BNs will be conducive to representing the causal knowledge of the problem through the structure of the network and evaluating how uncertainties propagate through the causal network to assessment endpoints and expected utilities for the alternatives.…”