Integrating decision triggers into conservation management practice

Abstract

Decision triggers show great potential for facilitating timely management action, promoting evidence‐based management and preventing undesirable changes to the status of species, ecosystems and threats. Integration of decision triggers into day‐to‐day management practice has been slow, constrained by insufficient resources and limited in‐house expertise. Arguably, the greatest impediment is the lack of an overarching process with robust and accessible methods for developing and implementing decision triggers in a manner that fits within an organization's established processes and skill sets. We identify the steps necessary for setting decision triggers and highlight how these steps align with commonly used conservation planning and management frameworks, for ease of adoption. We emphasize that decision triggers do not require a known ecological threshold, and can be applied to data‐rich and data‐poor contexts, with single or multiple management objectives. Synthesis and applications. This work highlights the necessary steps involved, and importantly, the suite of methods that can be used to set decision triggers, with the aim of supporting practitioners in the development of robust and defensible decision triggers.

Quantifying the value of monitoring species in multi‐species, multi‐threat systems

“…Our binary characterisation of uncertainty about each threat (it either is, or is not, causing decline in a species) is a simplification. However, our formulation addresses a threshold‐based approach to trigger conservation action such that it can assist managers in making difficult decisions about when to intervene in ecosystems to address undesirable changes (De Bie, Addison, & Cook, ). We therefore consider this to be a reasonable assumption for formulating decision problems that require timely evidence‐based management responses (Lindenmayer, Piggott, & Wintle, ).…”

Developing and applying control charts to detect changes in water chemistry parameters measured in the Athabasca River near the oil sands: A tool for surveillance monitoring

“…In contrast to the application of control charts in manufacturing, the use of this tool in ecological settings requires additional caution. For instance, in most cases control charts calculated for ecological data can only identify unusual observations or sets of observations; unless acceptability has been defined (de Bie et al 2018), thresholds of control charts are not necessarily associated with ecological or social relevance. Other limitations of statistical tools must also be considered.…”

How practitioners integrate decision triggers with existing metrics in conservation monitoring

“…However, programs often do not clearly articulate how monitoring information will prompt management actions, an oversight that can contribute to further biodiversity loss (Lindenmayer et al, 2013;Woinarski et al, 2017). Recently, significant focus has been placed on integrating decision triggers (see Table 1) into monitoring programs to facilitate evidence-based management (Addison et al, 2016;Cook et al, 2016;de Bie et al, 2018).…”

“…The benefits of adopting decision triggers for facilitating timely management actions are widely recognised (Addison et al, 2016;Cook et al, 2016;Nichols and Williams, 2006), and methodologies for fitting decision triggers into existing management frameworks have been detailed (de Bie et al, 2018). Although practitioners view decision triggers as a valuable management tool (Cook et al, 2016), there can be substantial financial, political, and scientific barriers to implementation (Addison et al, 2016;de Bie et al, 2018). This means practitioners will adapt new tools to fit with existing programs, rather than substantially modify programs to fit with new management tools .…”

“…This means practitioners will adapt new tools to fit with existing programs, rather than substantially modify programs to fit with new management tools . While others have discussed approaches for developing indicators for decision triggers (see Cook et al, 2016;de Bie et al, 2018), there has been little exploration of how practitioners integrate decision triggers into the structure of existing monitoring programs where the variables being monitored are already established. Addressing this knowledge gap is necessary to enable researchers to better support practitioners to incorporate decision triggers into monitoring programs, potentially leading to important benefits for biodiversity conservation.…”