Fooled by local robustness: an applied ecology perspective

In this short discussion, we point out that it is apparently as easy to be fooled by robustness as it is to be fooled by randomness. Our objective is to bring to the attention of applied ecologists that radius-of-stability robustness models are models of local robustness. As such, these models are utterly unsuitable for the treatment/management of a severe uncertainty characterized by a vast uncertainty space and a likelihood-free quantification of the uncertainty. This observation is particularly pertinent to applications of info-gap decision theory in ecology, conservation biology, and environmental management, where the objective is to identify decisions that are robust against a severe uncertainty of this type.