Setting priorities and making decisions for conservation risk management

Risk-based decisions are made routinely in medicine, toxicology, engineering, psychology, insurance and finance. The development of methods in these fields has been rapid but the paths followed and the tools developed have been different. To some extent the differences reflect the kinds of data and the range of problems people need to solve. In part, the differences are because methods have grown in relative isolation. A common problem facing practitioners in conservation biology is to identify priorities that discriminate among a suite of alternative actions. Biologists make decisions on a routine basis, but with little understanding of the techniques for decisions involving risk. The kinds of questions conservation biologists are obliged to answer will benefit substantially from advances in decision analysis and risk assessment made in other disciplines. This project will develop and expand the toolkit for problem solving available to conservation biologists by reviewing risk-based, priority setting methods in different fields, and bringing together people from different disciplines to examine the problems confronting conservation biologists, resulting in new approaches to finding solutions to priority setting and decision making problems.