College Credit:  2 semester hours

Who Should Attend:  Biologists and decision-makers involved in preparing or evaluating documents supporting decisions on conservation issues.  Participants are not required to be skilled in mathematics or computing, although familiarity with how the results of models can be applied is beneficial.  

Length:  5 days/36 hours

Objectives:  By the end of this session, the participant will be able to:

• Discover how to use models in planning for ecological and conservation biology decisions with defensible results;
• Discuss the modeling process, terminology, use of deterministic and stochastic models, what to leave out of a model, scale and resolution, age or state structured models, and how to deal with uncertainty in making conservation decisions;
• Learn how to use decision trees, approach decision-analysis under uncertainty, and how to incorporate a pragmatic modeling approach to data collection methods and data analysis;
• Learn how to design management-oriented modeling environments using short and long-term data sets, qualitative models, how to address adaptive management, and where GIS can be useful; and
• Discover how to use simple models for decision-analysis.