Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

The utility of a decision-support model to assess watershed condition for salmon recovery

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/fx719q55n

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  • Many contemporary fisheries and wildlife issues are complex, messy, and divisive. Most share a set of common characteristics including a lack of comprehensive scientific information, a limited understanding of biological processes, a scarcity of agency staff, time, money, and a tendency for differences over policy preferences to end up as debates over scientific information. When pressured to provide policy relevant science to decision makers, agency scientists are often left with no choice but to rely on some form of expert opinion. Information based on expert opinion may be valuable, but to be most useful in decision making, it must be perceived as being accurate, transparent, and calibrated by some measure of uncertainty. Formal methods of eliciting and using expert opinion are becoming more common in fisheries and wildlife management. Decision-support models are one such method but are still fairly new and untested for fish and wildlife problems. Using Oregon's Coastal Coho Salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch Evolutionarily Significant Unit (ESU) as a case study, the usefulness of Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) to assess watershed condition for coho salmon recovery was examined. To create the model, expert opinion was elicited using a formal Delphi process. We found that the Delphi technique is relatively inefficient and impractical for eliciting expert opinion on such topics as complex as watershed condition. We also identified ways that normative science can influence the consensus building process. Once our decision-support model was constructed we determined that it was not particularly useful for assessing watershed condition for coho salmon at the population level due to the lack of data. Data for all of the road parameters in the knowledge base were either nonexistent, or not available because they are privately owned or require extensive GIS analysis. In this case study we evaluated the tradeoffs of these formal methods: improving credibility and transparency came at the cost of time and procedural efficiency. Formal methods of eliciting and applying expert opinion for assessments are no panacea. Managers and decision makers will need to weigh these pros and cons on a case by case basis when contemplating whether these tools will add appreciable value to their assessments.
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