Decision analysis: An integrated approach to ecosystem exploitation and rehabilitation decisions

The barriers to effective ecosystem exploitation and rehabilitation are often both ecological and sociopolitical. Improved understanding of the ecological processes of rehabilitation will be valuable only if it can be implemented in land management decisionmaking. Regulatory agencies, private companies, environmental groups, and others concerned with exploitation and rehabilitation of ecosystems would benefit from clearer protocols for gathering information and making land management decisions. Attempts to formulate rehabilitation protocols analogous to those used to guide testing and licensing of hazardous materials have been frustrating.1 Most hazard evaluation protocols prescribe a sequence of information gathering and decisionmaking steps in which experiments or field studies provide yes/no answers leading to different branches for further testing or regulatory decisions.2,3 This yes/no framework of dichotomous branches does not capture the complexity and uniqueness of ecosystem rehabilitation decisions, where the outcome of rehabilitation treatments seems less predictable, or at least less well understood, than the effect of chemical compounds.

Duke Scholars

Author Lynn A. Maguire Environmental Sciences and Policy