Adaptive Management of Diseases
Adaptive Management is a structured approach to resource management. Through this iterative process, managers and scientists team together to improve resource management over time by learning from management outcomes.
At the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, adaptive management (AM) combines management and monitoring, with the aim of updating knowledge and improving decision-making over time. They provide a guide for managers who may realize the potential of AM, but are unsure where to start. The urgent need for iterative management decisions, the existence of uncertainty, and the opportunity for learning offered by often highly-controlled captive environments create favorable conditions for AM.
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Related Content
Winter feeding of elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and its effects on disease dynamics
Providing food to wildlife during periods when natural food is limited results in aggregations that may facilitate disease transmission. This is exemplified in western Wyoming where institutional feeding over the past century has aimed to mitigate wildlife–livestock conflict and minimize winter mortality of elk (Cervus canadensis). Here we review research across 23 winter feedgrounds where the mos
Authors
Gavin G. Cotterill, Paul C. Cross, Eric Cole, Rebecca K. Fuda, Jared D. Rogerson, Brandon Scurlock, Johan T. du Toit
Pneumonia in bighorn sheep: Risk and resilience
Infectious disease was an important driver of historic declines and extirpations of bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) in North America and continues to impede population restoration and management. Domestic sheep have long been linked to pneumonia outbreaks in bighorn sheep and this association has now been confirmed in 13 captive commingling experiments. However, ecological and etiological complex
Authors
E. Frances Cassirer, Kezia R. Manlove, Emily S. Almberg, Pauline Kamath, Mike Cox, Peregrine L. Wolff, Annette Roug, Justin M. Shannon, Rusty Robinson, Richard B. Harris, Ben J. Gonzales, Raina K. Plowright, Peter J. Hudson, Paul C. Cross, Andrew Dobson, Thomas E. Besser
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On rangelands the livestock–wildlife interface is mostly characterized by management actions aimed at controlling problems associated with competition, disease, and depredation. Wildlife communities (especially the large vertebrate species) are typically incompatible with agricultural development because the opportunity costs of wildlife conservation are unaffordable except in arid and semi-arid r
Authors
Johan T. du Toit, Paul C. Cross, Marion Valeix
Large-scale recovery of an endangered amphibian despite ongoing exposure to multiple stressors
Amphibians are one of the most threatened animal groups, with 32% of species at risk for extinction. Given this imperiled status, is the disappearance of a large fraction of the Earth’s amphibians inevitable, or are some declining species more resilient than is generally assumed? We address this question in a species that is emblematic of many declining amphibians, the endangered Sierra Nevada yel
Authors
Roland A. Knapp, Gary M. Fellers, Patrick M. Kleeman, David A. W. Miller, Vance T. Vrendenburg, Erica Bree Rosenblum, Cheryl J. Briggs
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Optimal intervention for disease outbreaks is often impeded by severe scientific uncertainty. Adaptive management (AM), long-used in natural resource management, is a structured decision-making approach to solving dynamic problems that accounts for the value of resolving uncertainty via real-time evaluation of alternative models. We propose an AM approach to design and evaluate intervention strate
Authors
Katriona Shea, Michael J. Tildesley, Michael C. Runge, Christopher J. Fonnesbeck, Matthew J. Ferrari
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In this chapter, we discuss the role of objectives and alternative actions in framing a natural resource management decision problem, with particular attention to thresholds. We outline a number of considerations in developing objectives and measurable attributes, including when utility thresholds may be needed to express the decision-makers’ values.We also discuss the development of a set of alte
Authors
Michael C. Runge, Terry Walshe
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Virus detection and mathematical modeling have gone through rapid developments in the past decade. Both offer new insights into the epidemiology of infectious disease and characterization of future risk; however, modeling has not yet been applied to designing the best surveillance strategies for viral and pathogen discovery. We review recent developments and propose methods to integrate viral and
Authors
Tiffany L. Bogich, Simon J. Anthony, James D. Nichols
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Wildlife management is a decision-focused discipline. It needs to integrate traditional wildlife science and social science to identify actions that are most likely to achieve the array of desires society has surrounding wildlife populations. Decision science, a vast field with roots in economics, operations research, and psychology, offers a rich set of tools to help wildlife managers frame, deco
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Michael C. Runge, J. Barry Grand, Michael S. Mitchell
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Infectious diseases are common in marine environments, but the effects of a changing climate on marine pathogens are not well understood. Here, we focus on reviewing current knowledge about how the climate drives hostpathogen interactions and infectious disease outbreaks. Climate-related impacts on marine diseases are being documented in corals, shellfish, finfish, and humans; these impacts are le
Authors
Colleen A. Burge, C. Mark Eakin, Carolyn S. Friedman, Brett Froelich, Paul K. Hershberger, Eileen E. Hofmann, Laura E. Petes, Katherine C. Prager, Ernesto Weil, Bette L. Willis, Susan E. Ford, C. Drew Harvell
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Management of federal public forests to meet sustainability goals and multiple use regulations is an immense challenge. To succeed, we suggest use of formal decision science procedures and tools in the context of structured decision making (SDM). SDM entails four stages: problem structuring (framing the problem and defining objectives and evaluation criteria), problem analysis (defining alternativ
Authors
Bruce G. Marcot, Matthew P. Thompson, Michael C. Runge, Frank R. Thompson, Steven McNulty, David Cleaves, Monica Tomosy, Larry A. Fisher, Bliss Andrew
Mitigating amphibian disease: strategies to maintain wild populations and control chytridiomycosis
Background
Rescuing amphibian diversity is an achievable conservation challenge. Disease mitigation is one essential component of population management. Here we assess existing disease mitigation strategies, some in early experimental stages, which focus on the globally emerging chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. We discuss the precedent for each strategy in systems ranging from agric
Authors
Douglas C. Woodhams, Jaime Bosch, Cheryl J. Briggs, Scott Cashins, Leyla R. Davis, Antje Lauer, Erin L. Muths, Robert Puschendorf, Benedikt R. Schmidt, Brandon Sheafor, Jamie Voyles
An introduction to adaptive management for threatened and endangered species
Management of threatened and endangered species would seem to be a perfect context for adaptive management. Many of the decisions are recurrent and plagued by uncertainty, exactly the conditions that warrant an adaptive approach. But although the potential of adaptive management in these settings has been extolled, there are limited applications in practice. The impediments to practical implementa
Authors
Michael C. Runge