“The Value of Information”: Adaptive Monitoring and the Trade Off Between Monitoring Costs and Precision in Ecosystem Assessment

Research and monitoring are a critical but expensive component of sustainable natural resources exploitation. Here we argue that a more adaptive and flexible monitoring program that foregoes optimization extractive ecosystem services (e.g. maximizing fisheries catch) in exchange for simplified monitoring system that seeks to ensure that the natural-human system is in a safe operating zone, and uses indicators of potential ecosystem tipping points to prompt more extensive and expensive monitoring.  We use three examples to demonstrate how the cost of information varies depending on ecosystem state, the degree of non-linearities in the system and especially tipping points where ecosystem services are degraded by destabilizing feedbacks.  We contrast the performance of three alternative approaches – one that applies precautionary buffers to reduce the likelihood of state-change, another that uses intensive monitoring to precisely estimate thresholds and uses that to optimize management, to an adaptive monitoring and less-ambitious set of management goals that seeks to stay in a “safe operating zone” across ecological, social and economic dimensions. A comprehensive understanding of how ecosystem characteristics dictate the trade off between precision in ecosystem state estimates and the costs of overexploitation is utilitarian for agencies and managers with finite resources.