Use of expert knowledge to elicit population trends for the koala (<i>Phascolarctos cinereus</i>)

Adams‐Hosking, Christine; McBride, Marissa; Baxter, Greg; Burgman, Mark A.; Villiers, Deidre de; Kavanagh, Rodney P.; Lawler, Ivan R.; Lunney, Daniel; Melzer, Alistair; Menkhorst, Peter; Molsher, Robyn; Moore, Ben D.; Phalen, David N.; Rhodes, Jonathan R.; Todd, Charles R.; Whisson, Desley A.; McAlpine, Clive

doi:10.1111/ddi.12400

Cited by 102 publications

(109 citation statements)

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“…Conservation and natural resource management often involve decisions for which data are absent or insufficient and consequences are potentially severe. In such circumstances, the elicitation of expert judgement has become routine and informs a variety of important applications from forecasting biosecurity risks (Wittmann et al., ), threatened species management (Adams‐Hosking et al., ), priority threat management (Chadés et al., ; Firn et al., ), predictive models (Krueger, Page, Hubacek, Smith, & Hiscock, ), environmental impact assessment (Knol, Slottje, van der Sluijs, & Lebret, ) and inputs into structured decision‐making (Gregory & Keeney, ). Expert judgement also underpins some of the most influential global environmental policies including the IUCN Red List and IPCC Assessments (IUCN, ; Mastrandrea et al., ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…() and Adams‐Hosking et al. (), while Delphi protocols have been utilised by Runge, Converse, and Lyons (), Adams‐Hosking et al. (), and Chadés et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…() and Adams‐Hosking et al. (), to date, there has been no detailed description of the steps required to carry out the method. This work fills that important practical gap.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol

et al. 2017

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Expert judgement informs a variety of important applications in conservation andnatural resource management, including threatened species management, environmental impact assessment and structured decision-making. However, expert judgements can be prone to contextual biases. Structured elicitation protocols mitigate these biases, and improve the accuracy and transparency of the resulting judgements. Despite this, the elicitation of expert judgement within conservation and natural resource management remains largely informal. We suggest this may be attributed to financial and practical constraints, which are not addressed by many existing structured elicitation protocols.2. In this paper, we advocate that structured elicitation protocols must be adopted when expert judgements are used to inform science. In order to motivate a wider adoption of structured elicitation protocols, we outline the IDEA protocol. The protocol improves the accuracy of expert judgements and includes several key steps which may be familiar to many conservation researchers, such as the four-step elicitation, and a modified Delphi procedure ("Investigate," "Discuss," "Estimate" and "Aggregate"). It can also incorporate remote elicitation, making structured expert judgement accessible on a modest budget.3. The IDEA protocol has recently been outlined in the scientific literature; however, a detailed description has been missing. This paper fills that important gap by clearly outlining each of the steps required to prepare for and undertake an elicitation. 4. While this paper focuses on the need for the IDEA protocol within conservation and natural resource management, the protocol (and the advice contained in this paper) is applicable to a broad range of scientific domains, as evidenced by its application to biosecurity, engineering and political forecasting. By clearly outlining the IDEA protocol, we hope that structured protocols will be more widely understood and adopted, resulting in improved judgements and increased transparency when expert judgement is required. K E Y W O R D SDelphi, expert elicitation, forecasting, four-step elicitation, IDEA protocol, quantitative estimates, structured expert judgement

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…() and Adams‐Hosking et al. (), while Delphi protocols have been utilised by Runge, Converse, and Lyons (), Adams‐Hosking et al. (), and Chadés et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol

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“…Koalas tend to maximize their water intake by favouring trees with high leaf moisture, which varies among species and local water availability (Ellis et al , Wu et al , Davies et al ). There is a considerable spatial variation in the consumption of different tree species by koalas across their current range (Phillips et al 2000); for example, Eucalyptus robusta (swamp mahogany) and E. parramattensis (Paramatta red gum) are most selected by koalas in the coastal Port Stephens area of New South Wales (possibly due to the limitation of these species’ spatial distributions).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…MaxEnt), spatial autocorrelation among locations can still result in biased parameter estimates and over‐representation of some regions (Dormann et al ). We applied two strategies to reduce the influence of potential biases in the occurrence points of the species we modelled: spatial filtering (Kramer‐Schadt et al ) and background weighting (Elith et al ). For spatial filtering, we removed all the repeated points within a 5‐km buffer radius.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate‐driven shifts in the distribution of koala‐browse species from the Last Interglacial to the near future

et al. 2019

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The koala's Phascolarctos cinereus distribution is currently restricted to eastern and south‐eastern Australia. However, fossil records dating from 70 ± 4 ka (ka = 103 yr) from south‐western Australia and the Nullarbor Plain are evidence of subpopulation extinctions in the southwest at least after the Last Interglacial (~128–116 ka). We hypothesize that koala sub‐population extinctions resulted from the eastward retraction of the koala's main browse species in response to unsuitable climatic conditions. We further posit a general reduction in the distribution of main koala‐browse trees in the near future in response climate change. We modelled 60 koala‐browse species and constructed a set of correlative species distribution models for five time periods: Last Interglacial (~128–116 ka), Last Glacial Maximum (~23–19 ka), Mid‐Holocene (~7–5 ka), present (interpolations of observed data, representative of 1960–1990), and 2070. We based our projections on five hindcasts and one forecast of climatic variables extracted from WorldClim based on two general circulation models (considering the most pessimistic scenario of high greenhouse‐gas emissions) and topsoil clay fraction. We used 17 dates of koala fossil specimens identified as reliable from 70 (± 4) to 535 (± 49) ka, with the last appearance of koalas at 70 ka in the southwest. The main simulated koala‐browse species were at their greatest modelled extent of suitability during the Last Glacial Maximum, with the greatest loss of koala habitat occurring between the Mid‐Holocene and the present. We predict a similar habitat loss between the present and 2070. The spatial patterns of habitat change support our hypothesis that koala extinctions in the southwest, Nullarbor Plain and central South Australia resulted from the eastward retraction of the dominant koala‐browse species in response to long‐term climate changes. Future climate patterns will likely increase the extinction risk of koalas in their remaining eastern ranges.

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Weighting and aggregating expert ecological judgments

Hemming

Hanea

Walshe

et al. 2020

Ecological Applications

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Citation: Hemming, V., A. M. Hanea, T. Walshe, and M. A. Burgman. 2020. Weighting and aggregating expert ecological judgments. Ecological Applications 30(4):Abstract. Performance weighted aggregation of expert judgments, using calibration questions, has been advocated to improve pooled quantitative judgments for ecological questions. However, there is little discussion or practical advice in the ecological literature regarding the application, advantages or challenges of performance weighting. In this paper we (1) illustrate how the IDEA protocol with four-step question format can be extended to include performance weighted aggregation from the Classical Model, and (2) explore the extent to which this extension improves pooled judgments for a range of performance measures. Our case study demonstrates that performance weights can improve judgments derived from the IDEA protocol with four-step question format. However, there is no a-priori guarantee of improvement. We conclude that the merits of the method lie in demonstrating that the final aggregation of judgments provides the best representation of uncertainty (i.e., validation), whether that be via equally weighted or performance weighted aggregation. Whether the time and effort entailed in performance weights can be justified is a matter for decision-makers. Our case study outlines the rationale, challenges, and benefits of performance weighted aggregations. It will help to inform decisions about the deployment of performance weighting and avoid common pitfalls in its application.

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Use of expert knowledge to elicit population trends for the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus)

Cited by 102 publications

References 60 publications

A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol

A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol

Climate‐driven shifts in the distribution of koala‐browse species from the Last Interglacial to the near future

Weighting and aggregating expert ecological judgments

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