Data from: How much is new information worth? Evaluating the financial benefit of resolving management uncertainty.

1. Conservation decision-makers face a trade-off between spending limited
funds on direct management action, or gaining new information in an
attempt to improve management performance in the future.
Value-of-information analysis can help to resolve this trade-off by
evaluating how much management performance could improve if new
information was gained. Value-of-information analysis has been used
extensively in other disciplines, but there are only a few examples where
it has informed conservation planning, none of which have used it to
evaluate the financial value of gaining new information. 2. We address
this gap by applying value-of-information analysis to the management of a
declining koala Phascolarctos cinereus population. Decision-makers
responsible for managing this population face uncertainty about survival
and fecundity rates, and how habitat cover affects mortality threats. The
value of gaining new information about these uncertainties was calculated
using a deterministic matrix model of the koala population to find the
expected population growth rate if koala mortality threats were optimally
managed under alternative model hypotheses, which represented the
uncertainties faced by koala managers. 3. Gaining new information about
survival and fecundity rates and the effect of habitat cover on mortality
threats will do little to improve koala management. Across a range of
management budgets, no more than 1·7% of the budget should be spent on
resolving these uncertainties. 4. The value of information was low because
optimal management decisions were not sensitive to the uncertainties we
considered. Decisions were instead driven by a substantial difference in
the cost efficiency of management actions. The value of information was up
to forty times higher when the cost efficiencies of different koala
management actions were similar. 5. Synthesis and applications. This study
evaluates the ecological and financial benefits of gaining new information
to inform a conservation problem. We also theoretically demonstrate that
the value of reducing uncertainty is highest when it is not clear which
management action is the most cost efficient. This study will help expand
the use of value-of-information analyses in conservation by providing a
cost efficiency metric by which to evaluate research or monitoring.