Resource-harvester cycles caused by delayed knowledge of the harvested population state can be dampened by harvester for
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Resource-harvester cycles caused by delayed knowledge of the harvested population state can be dampened by harvester forecasting Matthew W. Adamson 1
&
Frank M. Hilker 1
Received: 27 September 2019 / Accepted: 29 April 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The monitoring of ecosystems and the spread of information concerning their state among human stakeholders is often a lengthy process. The importance of mutual feedbacks between socioeconomic and ecological dynamics is being increasingly recognised in recent studies, but it is generally assumed that the feedback from the environment is instantaneous, ignoring any delay in the spread of ecosystem knowledge and the resulting potential for system stability loss. On the other hand, human actors rarely make purely myopic socioeconomic decisions as is often assumed. Rather, they show a degree of foresight for future utility which may have an opposing, stabilising effect to any delay in knowledge. In this paper, we consider a generic resource-harvester model with delayed ecosystem knowledge and predictive behaviour by the harvesters. We show that delays in the spread of information about the resource level can destabilise the bioeconomic equilibrium in the system and induce harvesting cycles or the collapse of the resource. Sufficiently farsighted prediction by the harvesters can stabilise the system, provided the delay is not too long. However, if the time horizon of prediction is too long relative to the timescale of resource growth, prediction can be destabilising even in the absence of delay. The results imply that effective monitoring of ecosystems and fast dissemination of the results are necessary for their sustainable use and that efforts to promote appropriate foresight among ecosystem users on the personal and institutional level would be beneficial to the stability of coupled socioeconomic-ecological systems. Keywords Social-ecological system . Time horizon . Time delay . Sustainable harvesting . Common pool resource . Knowledge transfer
Introduction Maintaining harvests of wildlife populations at a sustainable level is one of the major challenges facing ecologists today, particularly populations which serve as open access resources, the harvesting of which cannot be controlled for sociological Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00462-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Matthew W. Adamson [email protected] Frank M. Hilker [email protected] 1
Institute of Environmental Systems Research and Institute of Mathematics, University of Osnabrück, Barbarastraße 12, 49076 Osnabrück, Germany
or political reasons (Clark 2010). In this case, most of the costs of harvesting a population to low levels or even extinction are externalised to society as a whole, so that the decision to harvest or not and on how much harvesting effort to make is dominated by the short-term profitability of the action, rather than by que
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