Elicitation and Use of Expert Knowledge in Landscape Ecological Applications: A Synthesis

Abstract

There are many pressing questions and challenges in landscape ecology that have important consequences for sustainable resource management and the conservation of biodiversity. Given the spatial and temporal scopes and the resulting complexity of these issues, many landscape ecologists struggle to provide evidence-based ­solutions. This is especially apparent when we rely exclusively on the traditional approaches and data employed in the natural sciences to understand broad-scale phenomena that have interacting ecological and human elements. By exploring alternative ways to address the limitations of conventional observational and experimental methods, the authors of this book have used expert knowledge to complement poor data or replace missing empirical data, to cope with complexity that confounded the design and conduct of empirical studies, and to solve problems that required the coupling of knowledge generation with management or conservation decision making. The innovative and diverse array of methods illustrated in this book transcend our work in landscape ecology, providing tools and promoting insights that will be relevant within many other subdisciplines of applied ecology (Kuhnert et al. 2010; Orsi et al.