Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Dr., Anchorage, AK, 99508, USA.
School of Management and International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 505 South Chandalar Dr., Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2020 Oct 1;271:110924. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110924. Epub 2020 Jul 7.
Scientific evidence should inform environmental policy, but rapid environmental change brings high ecological uncertainty and associated barriers to the science-management dialogue. Biological invasions of aquatic plants are a worldwide problem with uncertain ecological and economic consequences. We demonstrate that the discrete choice method (DCM) can serve as a structured expert elicitation alternative to quantify expert opinion across a range of possible but uncertain environmental outcomes. DCM is widely applied in the social sciences to better understand and predict human preferences and trade-offs. Here we apply it to Alaska's first submersed invasive aquatic freshwater plant, Elodea spp. (elodea), and its unknown effects on salmonids. While little is known about interactions between elodea and salmonids, ecological research suggests that aquatic plant invasions can have positive and negative, as well as direct and indirect, effects on fish. We use DCM to design hypothetical salmonid habitat scenarios describing elodea's possible effect on critical environmental conditions for salmonids: prey abundance, dissolved oxygen, and vegetation cover. We then observe how experts choose between scenarios that they believe could support persistent salmonid populations in elodea-invaded salmonid habitat. We quantify the relative importance of habitat characteristics that influence expert choice and investigate how experts trade off between habitat characteristics. We take advantage of Bayesian techniques to estimate discrete choice models for individual experts and to simulate expert opinion for specific environmental management situations. We discuss possible applications and advantages of the DCM approach for expert elicitation in the ecological context. We end with methodological questions for future research.
科学证据应该为环境政策提供信息，但快速的环境变化带来了高度的生态不确定性和相关的障碍，阻碍了科学管理对话。水生植物的生物入侵是一个全球性的问题，其生态和经济后果不确定。我们证明，离散选择法（DCM）可以作为一种结构化的专家 elicitation 替代方法，用于量化一系列可能但不确定的环境结果下的专家意见。DCM 在社会科学中被广泛应用于更好地理解和预测人类的偏好和权衡。在这里，我们将其应用于阿拉斯加第一种入侵水生淡水植物——伊乐藻属（Elodea spp.）及其对鲑鱼的未知影响。虽然人们对伊乐藻属和鲑鱼之间的相互作用知之甚少，但生态研究表明，水生植物入侵会对鱼类产生积极和消极的、直接和间接的影响。我们使用 DCM 来设计描述伊乐藻属可能对鲑鱼关键环境条件（如猎物丰度、溶解氧和植被覆盖）产生影响的鲑鱼栖息地情景假设。然后，我们观察专家如何在他们认为可以支持鲑鱼种群在伊乐藻入侵鲑鱼栖息地中持续存在的情景之间做出选择。我们量化了影响专家选择的栖息地特征的相对重要性，并研究了专家在栖息地特征之间的权衡。我们利用贝叶斯技术来估计个体专家的离散选择模型，并模拟特定环境管理情况下的专家意见。我们讨论了 DCM 方法在生态背景下进行专家 elicitation 的可能应用和优势。最后，我们提出了未来研究的方法问题。
