Ecosystem approaches to natural resource conservation are seen as a way to provide better outcomes for ecosystems and for people, yet there is usually high uncertainty in the nature of interactions among ecosystem components. While the intuition for ecosystem approaches is straightforward, the resulting gains are an empirical question and its application is not without transitional costs. Here, we use a bioeconomic model to characterize the economic benefits of ecological knowledge through a simple model of fisheries that target a predator (piscivore) and a prey, by calculating the management pathway that maximizes net present value (NPV) for distinct ecological scenarios, and for initial conditions that represent historical efficacy of management.
Results/Conclusions
Management pathways generally approached similar harvest levels, but the pathways towards those levels varied considerably by ecological scenario. Application of the wrong harvest trajectory, which would happen if one assumed one type of ecological interaction but in fact another was occurring, generally led to only modest reductions in NPV. However, the risks were not distributed across stakeholders, and in particularly risks of large losses of NPV were much higher in the fishery targeting piscivores, especially when piscivores were heavily depleted. Our findings suggest that the ecosystem approach might provide the greatest benefits when used to identify system states where the cost of uncertainty is high, so that management strategies can be adopted to avoid those states.