Catchment-Wide Wetland Assessment and Prioritization Using the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Method TOPSIS

It is widely accepted that wetland ecosystems are under threat worldwide. Many communities are now trying to establish wetland rehabilitation programs, but are confounded by a lack of objective information on wetland condition or significance. In this study, a multi-criteria decision-making method, TOPSIS (the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), was adapted to assist in the role of assessing wetland condition and rehabilitation priority in the Clarence River Catchment (New South Wales, Australia). Using 13 GIS data layers that described wetland character, wetland protection, and wetland threats, the wetlands were ranked in terms of condition. Through manipulation of the original model, the wetlands were prioritized for rehabilitation. The method offered a screening tool for the managers in choosing potential candidate wetlands for rehabilitation in a region.     

The Nature Conservancy's approach to prioritizing conservation action

Like many conservation organizations and federal and state agencies, The Nature Conservancy is in the process of large-scale planning and prioritization efforts. To improve the efficiency of these planning efforts, the Conservancy has developed a methodology for these efforts. The results of these planning efforts will be a conservation blueprint which identifies the conservation areas necessary for conserving biodiversity and a subset of those areas where the Conservancy will focus its immediate efforts over the next 10 years. The subset of all the conservation areas identified in the planning process help The Nature Conservancy determine where it will work. This subset of areas (referred to as action sites) is selected using a tool which ranks key criteria for each conservation area. These criteria include the current conservation status of each area, complementarity to other areas selected, the diversity and viability of targets at the area, the urgency and degree of threats to the targets, the feasibility or opportunity to abate the threats at the area and the leverage potential of working at a conservation area. Taken together, these criteria help planners to select the areas where they will focus their conservation efforts.     

A resilience-based approach for comparing expert preferences across two large-scale coastal management programs

This report proposes a method for assessing resilience-building components in coastal social–ecological systems. Using the proposed model, the preferences of experts in Masan Bay (South Korea) and Puget Sound (USA) are compared. A total of 30 management objectives were determined and used to build a hierarchic tree designed using the principles of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Surveys were performed with 35 Puget Sound experts using face-to-face interviews and with 28 Masan Bay experts by mail. The results demonstrate that the legal objective, which enables legislation, was the highest preferred component in both regions. The knowledge translation variable was also given a high preference score in both regions. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that the Puget Sound experts significantly favored attention to education, habitat restoration and species protection objectives in comparison to the Masan Bay experts. The Masan Bay experts placed greater emphasis on legislation and the type of institutional design than did the Puget Sound experts. Using cluster analysis, four distinct groups of respondents were independently identified in Puget Sound and three groups were identified in Masan Bay. One unique subgroup in the Puget Sound experts group, which was characterized by its high preferences for habitat restoration and species protection, was not observed in Masan Bay. Demographic variables (length of career and role in coastal issue) failed to account for the differences in groupings and preferences in either region, except for the variable ‘favoring information source’ in the Puget Sound group. This finding implies that the demographic information was not related to differences in group opinions in both regions. The analysis framework presented here was effective in identifying expert preferences regarding the overall structure and emphasis in coastal management programs. Thus, this framework can be applied towards coastal policy development.     

Environmental Initiative Prioritization with a Delphi Approach: A Case Study

India is fast finding its place in the industrialized world and that is beginning to raise its environmental consciousness. The Delphi technique was used to prioritize specific needs and articulate a sustainable urban improvement strategy for the city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The Delphi technique is a means of achieving consensual validity among raters by providing them feedback regarding other raters' responses. Mumbai has several indigenous environmental groups that were tapped for activists and leaders; the study was conducted using ten environmentalists. In the initial phases the responses resulted in a range of possible program alternatives. The last two stages helped to seek out information that generated a consensus on the part of the respondent group. Statistical analysis methods included a hierarchical cluster analysis, mean, median, mode, and percent of agreement calculations using SPSS software. The face-to-face discussion in phase 4 clarified some issues and helped the group as a whole to outline the strategy for putting in place the essential elements of a framework to improve the quality of life in an urban environment.     

Landscape Planning for Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction III: Assessing Phosphorus and Sediment Reduction Potential

Riparian buffers have the potential to improve stream water quality in agricultural landscapes. This potential may vary in response to landscape characteristics such as soils, topography, land use, and human activities, including legacies of historical land management. We built a predictive model to estimate the sediment and phosphorus load reduction that should be achievable following the implementation of riparian buffers; then we estimated load reduction potential for a set of 1598 watersheds (average 54 km²) in Wisconsin. Our results indicate that land cover is generally the most important driver of constituent loads in Wisconsin streams, but its influence varies among pollutants and according to the scale at which it is measured. Physiographic (drainage density) variation also influenced sediment and phosphorus loads. The effect of historical land use on present-day channel erosion and variation in soil texture are the most important sources of phosphorus and sediment that riparian buffers cannot attenuate. However, in most watersheds, a large proportion (approximately 70%) of these pollutants can be eliminated from streams with buffers. Cumulative frequency distributions of load reduction potential indicate that targeting pollution reduction in the highest 10% of Wisconsin watersheds would reduce total phosphorus and sediment loads in the entire state by approximately 20%. These results support our approach of geographically targeting nonpoint source pollution reduction at multiple scales, including the watershed scale.     

Landscape Planning for Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction I: A Geographical Allocation Framework

Agricultural nonpoint source pollution remains a persistent environmental problem, despite the large amount of money that has been spent on its abatement. At local scales, agricultural best management practices (BMPs) have been shown to be effective at reducing nutrient and sediment inputs to surface waters. However, these effects have rarely been found to act in concert to produce measurable, broad-scale improvements in water quality. We investigated potential causes for this failure through an effort to develop recommendations for the use of riparian buffers in addressing nonpoint source pollution in Wisconsin. We used frequency distributions of phosphorus pollution at two spatial scales (watershed and field), along with typical stream phosphorus (P) concentration variability, to simulate benefit/cost curves for four approaches to geographically allocating conservation effort. The approaches differ in two ways: (1) whether effort is aggregated within certain watersheds or distributed without regard to watershed boundaries (dispersed), and (2) whether effort is targeted toward the most highly P-polluting fields or is distributed randomly with regard to field-scale P pollution levels. In realistic implementation scenarios, the aggregated and targeted approach most efficiently improves water quality. For example, with effort on only 10% of a model landscape, 26% of the total P load is retained and 25% of watersheds significantly improve. Our results indicate that agricultural conservation can be more efficient if it accounts for the uneven spatial distribution of potential pollution sources and the cumulative aspects of environmental benefits.     

Effect of risk aversion on prioritizing conservation projects

Conservation outcomes are uncertain. Agencies making decisions about what threat mitigation actions to take to save which species frequently face the dilemma of whether to invest in actions with high probability of success and guaranteed benefits or to choose projects with a greater risk of failure that might provide higher benefits if they succeed. The answer to this dilemma lies in the decision maker's aversion to risk—their unwillingness to accept uncertain outcomes. Little guidance exists on how risk preferences affect conservation investment priorities. Using a prioritization approach based on cost effectiveness, we compared 2 approaches: a conservative probability threshold approach that excludes investment in projects with a risk of management failure greater than a fixed level, and a variance‐discounting heuristic used in economics that explicitly accounts for risk tolerance and the probabilities of management success and failure. We applied both approaches to prioritizing projects for 700 of New Zealand's threatened species across 8303 management actions. Both decision makers’ risk tolerance and our choice of approach to dealing with risk preferences drove the prioritization solution (i.e., the species selected for management). Use of a probability threshold minimized uncertainty, but more expensive projects were selected than with variance discounting, which maximized expected benefits by selecting the management of species with higher extinction risk and higher conservation value. Explicitly incorporating risk preferences within the decision making process reduced the number of species expected to be safe from extinction because lower risk tolerance resulted in more species being excluded from management, but the approach allowed decision makers to choose a level of acceptable risk that fit with their ability to accommodate failure. We argue for transparency in risk tolerance and recommend that decision makers accept risk in an adaptive management framework to maximize benefits and avoid potential extinctions due to inefficient allocation of limited resources. El Efecto de la Aversión de Riesgo sobre la Priorización de Proyectos de Conservación     

WHIPPET: A novel tool for prioritizing invasive plant populations for regional eradication

Large geographic areas can have numerous incipient invasive plant populations that necessitate eradication. However, resources are often deficient to address every infestation. Within the United States, weed lists (either state-level or smaller unit) generally guide the prioritization of eradication of each listed species uniformly across the focus region. This strategy has several limitations that can compromise overall effectiveness, which include spending limited resources on 1) low impact populations, 2) difficult to access populations, or 3) missing high impact populations of low priority species. Therefore, we developed a novel science-based, transparent, analytical ranking tool to prioritize weed populations, instead of species, for eradication and tested it on a group of noxious weeds in California. For outreach purposes, we named the tool WHIPPET (Weed Heuristics: Invasive Population Prioritization for Eradication Tool). Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process that included expert opinion, we developed three major criteria, four sub-criteria, and four sub-sub-criteria, taking into account both species and population characteristics. Subject matter experts weighted and scored these criteria to assess the relative impact, potential spread, and feasibility of eradication (major criteria) for 100 total populations of 19 species. Species-wide population scores indicated that conspecific populations do not necessarily group together in the final ranked output. Thus, priority lists based solely on species-level characteristics are less effective compared to a blended prioritization based on both species attributes and individual population and site parameters. WHIPPET should facilitate a more efficacious decision-making process allocating limited resources to target invasive plant infestations with the greatest predicted impacts to the region under consideration.     

Different ranking methods: potentialities and pitfalls for the case of European opinion poll

Prioritization and ranking of objects are primary needs in various substantive fields. It might be said that ranking and comparison are the first step in every risk assessment procedure, whatever the ‘risk’ is intended as: social, environmental, political or economic. Often objects to be ranked are valued by a multi-dimensional attribute which is usually transformed into a composite numerical score. In spite of conventional solutions, the author agrees with recent recommendations of performing multiple ranking, keeping indicators separated. Different innovative methods are analyzed and compared: Hasse diagrams method, POSAC and Nonlinear PCA. The first one stems directly from partial order theory, the second one may be seen as an approximation of Hasse representation in a two dimensional space, whilst the third one belongs to the wide set of non-linear multivariate techniques and it is particularly suitable in handling data of categorical type. Among them, the first two methods compare objects on the basis only on order property of data, whilst the last one simultaneously performs an optimal scale of qualitative attributes and a ranking of objects. The case study is based on the Eurobarometer survey carried out in 2002, at the request of the European Commission, which collects Europeans opinion about various political and social issues. The analysis is focused on users’ level of satisfaction about access easiness, cost, quality, information received and contracts of various services of general interest, such as telephone services, power (gas and electricity) providers, water and postal utilities, urban and rail transports. Separate indicators are set up for each facet of each service within different European regions. Eventually, the ranking of European regions is performed on the basis of the overall performance of services of general interest, as perceived by users. Selected methods lead to almost alike results, still with some differentiations due to different approaches used. As it frequently occurs, each method has its own advantages and pitfalls which are here explored and compared.     

东北自然保护区压力威胁影响因子及趋势

论文运用世界自然保护区委员会(WCPA)和世界自然基金会(WWF)推荐的自然保护区管理快速评估和优先性确定方法(RAPPAM),对东北地区部分自然保护区面临的压力和威胁及其发展趋势进行了调查分析。结果显示,在保护区所面临的14种威胁因子中,火灾、林木砍伐、偷猎、非林木产品采集(NTFP)、旅游、放牧6个因子的影响范围较广、影响程度较高、影响时间较长,是保护区应重点控制的威胁因子。因此,今后的保护区管理应加强对火灾、林木砍伐和非木质林产品采集等因素的监控,同时通过制定相关政策、采取适当措施有效控制并减少保护区生态旅游对保护对象产生的负面影响,提高保护区管理的有效性。