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.