| Sustainability can be defined as maintaining or increasing society's "genuine wealth" or the pool of society's capital. This pool of capital includes financial, physical, natural, and human capital. Sustainable natural resource management science is therefore fundamentally a capital management science. Natural resource management involves making tradeoffs across potential investments to maintain or enhance the pool of capital, with a focus on natural capital. Making such tradeoffs, however, is complicated by the complexities of ecological and economic systems. Models are useful tools for exposing, analyzing, and aiding in making tradeoffs among potential natural resource management strategies or investments. This dissertation uses a variety modeling approaches to expose, analyze, and aid in making tradeoffs associated with thee fishery management problems. A common theme among these three problems is they all involve aquatic species introduction; the first two address aquatic infectious pathogens and the third one addresses fish stocking and control of an invasive species. All chapters are motivated by Great Lakes issues involving fish stocking, but they all have broader implications.;Making tradeoffs is a fundamental part of natural resource management. In order to make tradeoffs, information about the ecological and economic systems is needed. Collecting this information involves tradeoffs as well (Chapters 2 and 3). The complex nature of ecological and economic interactions complicates making tradeoffs, and models can help organize thinking and facilitate analysis. Increasing awareness of the joint production of ecosystem services, multiple equilibria and non-convexities, and the imperfectly targeted nature of management actions (Chapter 4) should be viewed in light of advancing knowledge about ecological and economic systems. It is not that tradeoffs are more complex than in the absence of this knowledge but rather that there is a growing appreciation and desire to account for potential, unintended effects of management actions. |
