Active adaptive conservation of threatened species in the face of uncertainty

Eve McDonald-Madden, William J. M. Probert, Cindy E. Hauser, Michael C. Runge, Hugh P. Possingham, Menna E. Jones, Joslin L. Moore, Tracy M. Rout, Peter A. Vesk, Brendan A. Wintle

Adaptive management has a long history in the natural resource management literature, but despite this, few practitioners have developed adaptive strategies to conserve threatened species. Active adaptive management provides a framework for valuing learning by measuring the degree to which it improves long-run management outcomes. The challenge of an active adaptive approach is to find the correct balance between gaining knowledge to improve management in the future and achieving the best short-term outcome based on current knowledge. We develop and analyze a framework for active adaptive management of a threatened species. Our case study concerns a novel facial tumor disease affecting the Australian threatened species Sarcophilus harrisii: the Tasmanian devil. We use stochastic dynamic programming with Bayesian updating to identify the management strategy that maximizes the Tasmanian devil population growth rate, taking into account improvements to management through learning to better understand disease latency and the relative effectiveness of three competing management options. Exactly which management action we choose each year is driven by the credibility of competing hypotheses about disease latency and by the population growth rate predicted by each hypothesis under the competing management actions. We discover that the optimal combination of management actions depends on the number of sites available and the time remaining to implement management. Our approach to active adaptive management provides a framework to identify the optimal amount of effort to invest in learning to achieve long-run conservation objectives.