McMurdo Hamilton, Thalassa; Ewen, John G.; Beauchamp, Antony J.; Makan, Troy; Rowcliffe, Marcus; Canessa, Stefano (2023). Data-driven counterfactual evaluation of management outcomes to improve emergency conservation decisions. Conservation letters, 16(1) Wiley 10.1111/conl.12925
|
Text
McMurdo_Hamilton_ConLet2023.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (778kB) | Preview |
Monitoring is needed to assess conservation success and improve management, but naïve or simplistic interpretation of monitoring data can lead to poor decisions. We illustrate how to counter this risk by combining decision-support tools and quantitative counterfactual analysis. We analyzed 20 years of egg rescue for tara iti (Sternula nereis davisae) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Survival is lower for rescued eggs; however, only eggs perceived as imminently threatened by predators or weather are rescued, so concluding that rescue is ineffective would be biased. Equally, simply assuming all rescued eggswould have died if left in situ is likely to be simplistic. Instead, we used the monitoring data itself to estimate statistical support for a wide space of uncertain counterfactuals about decisions and fate of rescued eggs. Results suggest under past management, rescuing and leaving eggs would have led to approximately the same overall fledging rate, because of likely imperfect threat assessment and low survival of rescued eggs to fledging. Managers are currently working to improve both parameters. Our approach avoids both naïve interpretation of observed outcomes and simplistic assumptions thatmanagement is always justified, using the same data to obtain unbiased quantitative estimates of counterfactual support.
Item Type: |
Journal Article (Original Article) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Ecology and Evolution (IEE) 08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Ecology and Evolution (IEE) > Conservation Biology |
UniBE Contributor: |
Canessa, Stefano |
Subjects: |
500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology 500 Science > 590 Animals (Zoology) |
ISSN: |
1755-263X |
Publisher: |
Wiley |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Olivier Roth |
Date Deposited: |
03 Apr 2024 09:52 |
Last Modified: |
03 Apr 2024 09:52 |
Publisher DOI: |
10.1111/conl.12925 |
BORIS DOI: |
10.48350/195412 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/195412 |
Actions (login required)
 |
Edit item |