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 politicall...

生态保护管理在生态学领域的重要性与日俱增，因为当下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落实旨在达成特定保护目标的保护方案时，其工作始终处于政治-生态系统的框架之内。本文中，我们开发了一款决策支持工具，能够为受管理的野生生物种群筛选出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。我们以南非与亚洲之间的犀牛角走私案例为研究对象，搭建、校准并应用了该工具。借助此类影响图，我们阐释了该保护政策将如何改变偷猎犀牛者的认知体系，并将政策实施前后偷猎者的认知状态定位至感知风险-收益空间中。我们将模型基于群体行为与犀牛种群丰度的观测数据进行了统计校准。随后，我们利用该已校准的模型，开展政治层面相关的计算……