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Developing Objectives with Multiple Stakeholders: Adaptive Management of Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knots in the Delaware Bay

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Abstract

Structured decision making (SDM) is an increasingly utilized approach and set of tools for addressing complex decisions in environmental management. SDM is a value-focused thinking approach that places paramount importance on first establishing clear management objectives that reflect core values of stakeholders. To be useful for management, objectives must be transparently stated in unambiguous and measurable terms. We used these concepts to develop consensus objectives for the multiple stakeholders of horseshoe crab harvest in Delaware Bay. Participating stakeholders first agreed on a qualitative statement of fundamental objectives, and then worked to convert those objectives to specific and measurable quantities, so that management decisions could be assessed. We used a constraint-based approach where the conservation objectives for Red Knots, a species of migratory shorebird that relies on horseshoe crab eggs as a food resource during migration, constrained the utility of crab harvest. Developing utility functions to effectively reflect the management objectives allowed us to incorporate stakeholder risk aversion even though different stakeholder groups were averse to different or competing risks. While measurable objectives and quantitative utility functions seem scientific, developing these objectives was fundamentally driven by the values of the participating stakeholders.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Horseshoe Crab Technical Committee, USFWS Shorebird Technical Committee, and the Management Board for their participation in and support of this process. We are grateful to the members of the Delaware Bay Adaptive Management Modeling Work Group (J. Brust, L. Niles, K. Kalasz, J. Sweka, R. Wong, J. Nichols, M. Kopfler, and B. Spear). We also thank the USGS and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for financial and logistic support of this work. Lastly, we thank C.T. Moore and other reviewers and editors of this paper for helping revise and improve this manuscript. The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. U.S. Geological Survey, Alabama Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, School of Forestry and Wildlife Science, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849, USA

    Conor P. McGowan

  2. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of Migratory Bird Management, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, 11510 America Holly Drive, Laurel, MD, 20708, USA

    James E. Lyons

  3. U.S. Geological Survey, Leetown Science Center, 11649 Leetown Road, Kearneysville, WV, 25430, USA

    David R. Smith

  4. U.S. Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, 12100 Beech Forest Rd., Laurel, MD, 20708, USA

    Conor P. McGowan

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  1. Conor P. McGowan
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Correspondence to Conor P. McGowan.

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McGowan, C.P., Lyons, J.E. & Smith, D.R. Developing Objectives with Multiple Stakeholders: Adaptive Management of Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knots in the Delaware Bay. Environmental Management 55, 972–982 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-014-0422-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-014-0422-8

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