PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #30: Modeling.
Presiding: T. Day
Tuesday, August 6. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Apache Meeting Room, TCC.
Uncertainty, relativity and spatially-explicit ecological models: methods to aid management planning from Everglades restoration.
GROSS, LOUIS*,1, PALMER, MARK1, COMISKEY, JANE1, 1 University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
ABSTRACT- Regional management of natural systems requires methods to supply rational assessments of the effects of alternative scenarios on various biotic components of the system. For much of the last decade, the ATLSS (Across Trophic Level System Simulation) project has been developing and applying a set of models designed to aid in restoration planning for South Florida. Developed in close collaboration with many field researchers with long experience in the Everglades, ATLSS has been extensively applied throughout the planning process and used in the evaluation of the biotic impacts of alternative hydrologic scenarios. ATLSS provides spatially-explicit assessments of the relative impacts on a variety of species. This follows a relative assessment protocol in which all ATLSS outputs are compared to a base plan, and stakeholders can then use their own criteria to rank the alternatives. These models have numerous uncertainties, including unpredictability of future abiotic driving conditions, lack of appropriate spatial data to evaluate model assumptions, and difficulty in estimating model parameters which potentially vary in time and space. A relative assessment approach provides a means to directly evaluate how rankings are affected by these uncertainties. We demonstrate this using the SESI (Spatially-Explicit Species Index) models which are part of ATLSS. By assuming different weather conditions and making multiple SESI model runs, we can provide guidance on the stability of rankings to uncertainties. Our results indicate that the spatial scale at which averaging is assumed affects the stability of the rankings.
KEY WORDS: modeling, spatial, assessment, uncertainty