Re-Connecting Watersheds While Managing Risk: Developing a Basic Model for Decision Support

Habitat restoration efforts that eliminate barriers and re-connect watersheds improve habitat for species that need large contiguous systems. However those barriers also prevent the spreading of pathogens, contaminants and invasive plant or animal species. Managers are faced with balancing a flow of costs, benefits and risks to achieve their connectivity, habitat management and restoration goals. Re-connecting impaired systems, particularly those systems containing mobile invasive species, contaminants or pathogens introduces the risk that contaminants and invasives will spread in these newly connected watersheds. Some of these risks present irreversible outcomes, compounding the choice problem.  Habitat restoration is expensive and restoration dollars are limited. How do you balance the cost, benefits and risk of success, including the risk of spreading invasive species? Decisions made that do not adequately account for the costs and risks achieve success by accident. Restoration dollars are too limited to continue investment without fully examining and incorporating costs, benefits and risk of each project. Furthermore, well developed decision support systems can help target connectivity and restoration funds so that limited investment funds can achieve the best return for the lowest cost. This presentation will develop a basic economic model of the relationship between costs, benefits, risk and uncertainty and expand upon that model creating a case study of decision support that incorporates these factors. Building a decision support tool requires estimating basic benefit/cost functions for each restoration/connectivity technology, conducting sensitivity analysis under various risk levels and using those analyses to examine individual projects.