Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Georgia
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Our project goal is to develop a decision support system for the iterative selection of conservation actions that leads to a viable landscape supporting the statewide tortoise population and associated species and communities of interest. We will approach this goal by using principles of structured decision making, in which the decision maker, Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), is directly involved in the articulation of objectives, the definition of alternative actions, and the development of predictive models to evaluate consequences of different actions. Key uncertainties that make the decision difficult will be identified with DNR and incorporated into the decision making framework. This work will result in an integrated system of databases, computer algorithms, and monitoring designs that provides a mostly automated process for decision making under uncertainty and for acquiring information to reduce uncertainty.