Managing Wildlife Faced with Pathogen Risks Involving Multi-Stable Outcomes.

Most models designed to understand how to manage infected wildlife systems with bioeconomic multi-stability take the initial conditions as given, thereby treating pathogen invasion as unanticipated. We examine how management is an opportunity to influence the conditions, which in turn affect the optimal outcome. To capture these management choices, we extend the Poisson "collapse" model of Reed and Heras (Bull Math Biol 54:185-207, 1992) to allow for endogenous initial conditions and multi-stability. We account for two uncertain processes: the introduction and establishment of the pathogen. Introduction is conditional on anthropogenic investments in prevention, and both random processes are conditional on how we manage the native population to provide natural prevention of invasion and natural insurance against establishment placing the system in an undesirable basin of attraction. We find that both multi-stability of the invaded system and these uncertainty processes can create economic non-convexities that yield multiple candidate solutions to the optimization problem. Additionally, we illustrate how the nature of natural protection against introduction and establishment risks can play an important role in the allocation of anthropogenic investments.