Data from: Finding politically feasible conservation policies: the case of wildlife trafficking

Conservation management is of increasing importance in ecology as most ecosystems nowadays are essentially managed ones. Conservation managers work within a political-ecological system when they develop and attempt to implement a conservation plan that is designed to meet particular conservation goals. In this article, we develop a decision support tool that can identify a conservation policy for a managed wildlife population that is both sustainable and politically feasible. Part of our tool consists of a simulation model composed of interacting influence diagrams. We build, fit, and use our tool on the case of rhino horn trafficking between South Africa and Asia. Using these diagrams, we show how a rhino poacher’s belief system can be modified by such a policy and locate it in a perceived risks-benefits space before and after policy implementation. We statistically fit our model to observations on group actions and rhino abundance. We then use this fitted model to compute a politically feasible conservation policy.

生态保护管理在生态学领域的重要性日益凸显，因当前绝大多数生态系统本质上均为受管理型生态系统。保护管理者在制定并尝试推行旨在达成特定保护目标的保护计划时，需在政治-生态系统（political-ecological system）框架内开展工作。本文构建了一款决策支持工具（decision support tool），可用于为受管理的野生动物种群筛选兼具可持续性与政治可行性的保护政策。该工具的核心组成部分之一是由交互影响图（interacting influence diagrams）构成的仿真模型（simulation model）。我们以南非与亚洲间的犀牛角走私案例为研究对象，完成了该工具的构建、拟合与应用。借助这些交互影响图，我们阐明了该政策可如何改变犀牛偷猎者的信念体系，并确定了政策实施前后该信念体系在感知风险-收益空间中的位置。我们以群体行为与犀牛种群丰度的观测数据为基础，对模型开展统计拟合。随后我们利用该拟合后的模型，计算得到具备政治可行性的保护政策方案。