The decision to implement environmental protection options is a political one. These, and other political and social decisions affect the balance of the ecosystem and how the point of equilibrium desired is to be reached. This book develops a stochastic, temporal model of how political processes influence and are influenced by ecosystem processes and looks at how to find the most politically feasible plan for managing an at-risk ecosystem. Finding such a plan is accomplished by first fitting a mechanistic political and ecological model to a data set composed of observations on both political ...

Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-240) and index.

Managing a political-ecological system. Introduction -- Simulator architecture, operation, and example output -- Blue whale population management -- Finding the most practical ecosystem management plan -- An open-web-based ecosystem management tool -- Model formulation, estimation, and reliability. Influence diagrams of political decision making -- Group IDs for the East African cheetah EMT -- Modeling wildlife population dynamics with an influence diagram -- Political action taxonomies, collection protocols, and an actions history example -- Ecosystem data -- Statistical fitting of the political-ecological system simulator -- Assessing the simulator's reliability and improving its construct validity -- Assessment. Current capabilities and limitations of the politically realistic EMT -- Appendices. Appendix A. Heuristics used to assign hypothesis values to parameters -- Appendix B. Cluster computing version of Hooke and Jeeves search.

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