Structured Decision Making in Fish and Wildlife Management

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to the theory and application of structured decision making (SDM). SDM incorporates human-centered values into the decision making process, identifies a set of actions to achieve those values, and creates models that connect actions to outcomes. Though SDM has long been used in business contexts, SDM has recently been applied to diverse problems in wildlife and fisheries management at local, state, and federal levels. Unlike other decision processes that strive to separate management and scientific endeavors, SDM is a collaborative process that unites managers and scientists, and adds transparency to decision making to promote buy-in and trust. The course will comprise a mixture of lectures, discussions of the primary literature, lab exercises, and mock workshop sessions.