NTRES 4601 - Decision Making in Natural Resource Management

(CU-SBY)

Spring. 2 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: NTRES 4600 is highly recommended, but not required. Co-meets with NTRES 6601. Students taking NTRES 6601 will be expected to make more significant contributions to classroom discussions, and will be assigned additional out-of-class assignments over the course of the semester.

E. Cooch.

This course will provide an introduction to the principles and practice of structured decision making and its application in natural resource management. Students will become familiar with methods for finding optimal solutions to decision problems, and will apply these methods to natural resource problems. Students will become familiar with the application of quantitative decision modeling tools: single and multiple-objective trade-off techniques, decision trees, Bayesian belief and decision networks, linear programming, and dynamic optimization.

Outcome 1: Students will be able to analyze decision systems in terms of proximate and ultimate causation and actions, and be able to work with multi-level systems interactions and decision structures.

Outcome 2: Students will be able to use basic conceptual and analytical tools for describing and quantifying decision structures for dynamical systems.

Outcome 3: Students will be able to develop optimization models for decision making as applies to natural resource management. In particular, students will become familiar with the application of quantitative decision modeling tools: single and multiple-objective trade-off techniques, decision trees, Bayesian belief and decision networks, linear programming, and dynamic optimization.

Outcome 4: Students will be able to integrate conceptual and theoretical understanding to reach specified conservation management objectives.

Outcome 5: Students will be able to articulate in written and oral form their understanding of both the concepts and analytical tools, and the role of sources of uncertainty, in application to problems in conservation and resource management.