Decision Making in Natural Resource Management

Topics

• Students will be able to analyze decision systems in terms of proximate and ultimate causation and actions, and be able to work with multi-level systems interactions and decision structures.
• Students will be able to use basic conceptual and analytical tools for describing and quantifying decision structures for dynamical systems.
• Students will be able to develop optimization models for decision making as applies to natural resource management. In particular, students will become familiar with the application of quantitative decision modeling tools: single and multiple-objective trade-off techniques, decision trees, Bayesian belief and decision networks, linear programming, and dynamic optimization.
• Students will be able to integrate conceptual and theoretical understanding to reach specified conservation management objectives.
• Students will be able to articulate in written and oral form their understanding of both the concepts and analytical tools, and the role of sources of uncertainty, in application to problems in conservation and resource management.

Official roster learning outcomes