Introduction to Environmental AnalysisEnviron 239

Instructor: Prof. W. S. CurrieGSIs: Nate Bosch, Michele Tobias

Skills Unit 10: Integrating Ecology, Engineering, and

Management

Questions for class discussion after each group:

1. Do you agree with the group’s conclusion about the modeled simulations?

2. Do you think these simulations are realistic?

3. What are some limitations of the simulations performed?

4. Did we learn anything about decision making for a real fishery?

What we learned about the use of models to aid in decision making

• Simulating multiple contrasting scenarios can be useful, but it might it might take some exploration to find the best set of scenarios

• Year-to-year randomness can alter the way a resource needs to be managed.

• Key state variables (such as adult stock size, or number of migrating smolts) need to be monitored each year so the manager knows what the system is doing

• Simulation of one effect alone (e.g. dam construction) does not tell you how that might interact with other effects (e.g. development in the watershed)

What we learned about the use of models to aid in decision making (2)

• Adjusting parameters to test scenarios seems arbitrary unless you have some data on what the values are and how they change under the different scenarios

• It seemed that just about every change we simulated seemed to degrade the resource in some way