DEVELOPMENT OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESOURCE ASSESSMENTS

There is a critical need to balance costs, benefits, and short- and long-term cumulative impacts in resource stewardship, as the nation continues to determine priorities for resource use. However, lack of scientific data and integrative methods hamper the transparent assessment of competing resource demands. In recognition of the need for resource assessments that integrate across disciplinary boundaries, the 2007 USGS Science Strategy called for the development and implementation of multidisciplinary approaches to resource assessments. We will discuss our development of conceptual and practical tools to conduct multidisciplinary resource assessments on a broad scale.

We selected southwest Alaska as a study region within which to develop and apply our assessment methods. We consider resources not in a strictly commodity-based sense but in a more ‘holistic' manner, which allows ecosystem services (i.e., non-economic, and non-human uses or functions of ecosystems) to also be considered as resources.  Conceptually, we use a systems approach to evaluate a set of interacting components which make up a whole. Through selecting the generic term “systems approach”, our hope is to speak across the multiple disciplines necessary for an integrated multidisciplinary resource assessment. We recognize that influences, processes, or resources can be imported or exported across the system's boundaries, and thus some level of cross-boundary dynamics must be accommodated (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Examples of the types of cross-boundary influences, processes, or resources (starred lines) discussed for southcentral Alaska. The blue border delineates a possible focal area within the region that has diverse resource values, multiple interest groups, and a significant amount of scientific understanding of the system. Many of these cross-boundary interactions are important considerations for both Alaska and the nation.

An illustrative but non-exhaustive presentation of possible components and their interactions for southwest Alaska, is presented in figure 2. With this conceptualization, our goal is to demonstrate that multidisciplinary resource assessments evaluate interactions among the system components in order to highlight how use of one or more resources may affect the system as a whole, via a cascade of direct and indirect effects. Explicit inclusion of humans recognizes the broad extent of many human interactions and the vast array of interactions that humans have with other system components. We hope this conceptual formulation will aid communication with commodity-based interests and human-oriented disciplines.

Figure 2. Conceptual model of a multidisciplinary resource assessment illustrating some interactions (solid lines) among the system components (yellow), features (white) and subcomponents (blue).

To transform our conceptual, qualitative approach into a quantitative, mechanistic model, we are using a Bayesian belief network (BBN) to address the broad landscape-scale linkages that are conceptualized.  BBNs should prove a useful modeling tool because of their ability to incorporate different types of data (empirical and expert knowledge) of different degrees of uncertainty.