Towards Building a Sustainable Future: Positioning Ecological Modelling for Impact in Ecosystems Management

Abstract

As many ecosystems worldwide are in peril, efforts to manage them sustainably require scientific advice. While numerous researchers around the world use a great variety of models to understand ecological dynamics and their responses to disturbances, only a small fraction of these models are ever used to inform ecosystem management. There seems to be a perception that ecological models are not useful for management, even though mathematical models are indispensable in many other fields. We were curious about this mismatch, its roots, and potential ways to overcome it. We searched the literature on recommendations and best practices for how to make ecological models useful to the management of ecosystems and we searched for 'success stories' from the past. We selected and examined several cases where models were instrumental in ecosystem management. We documented their success and asked whether and to what extent they followed recommended best practices. We found that there is not a unique way to conduct a research project that is useful in management decisions. While research is more likely to have impact when conducted with many stakeholders involved and specific to a situation for which data are available, there are great examples of small groups or individuals conducting highly influential research even in the absence of detailed data. We put the question of modelling for ecosystem management into a socio-economic and national context and give our perspectives on how the discipline could move forward.

Keywords: Ecological modelling; Ecosystem management; Knowledge Translation.

Fig. 1

Different paths of the information flow resulting in decision-making supported by use of mathematical models. The blue, yellow, and red paths (visualized by the corresponding chain of arrows) correspond to the use of models of increasing complexity as required by the complexity of the given natural system. Along the blue path, the approaches from a standard ecologist’s toolbox are predominantly used. Use of less standard and/or more advanced mathematical techniques along the yellow and red paths introduces the crucial stage of manager perception where the modelling results should be linked to the real world using manager’s terms (that often differ from the modeller’s terms, see Sects. 4.1 and 4.2 for a discussion of ‘different cultures’) (Color figure online)

Fig. 2

Three information streams that are key components of policy development. These three streams are important in determining whether or not research results will be used to inform policy. Decision-makers must integrate information from government agency priorities (centre stream), costs (blue box), and public opinion (red box). Research (university, government, etc.—green box) informs all three streams. Public opinion is often rooted in media attention to grassroots issues (purple box). If there is sufficient public support of management actions recommended by research, and the costs (monetary costs and/or political costs of action and/or inaction) are favourable, the research can lead to policy action (gray box). There is a bidirectional relationship between research and activist organizations because the latter are not simply recipients of research knowledge, but can also be contributors by funding or co-funding, or—more recently—through citizen science (Color figure online)