PATH Scoping of Candidate Research, Monitoring and Experimental Management Actions: Concurrently Reducing Key Uncertainties and Recovering Stocks Working Draft

One of PATH’s original objectives is to assess the ability to distinguish among competing hypotheses from future information, and advise institutions on adaptive management experiments, monitoring, and research that would maximize learning. In the PATH Final Report for Fiscal Year 1998, we set out a plan for addressing this objective (Table ES-1). Following consultation with the Implementation Team (I.T.) early in 1999, PATH established an Experimental Management Workgroup to more clearly define experimental management and generate a list of potential experimental management actions (i.e., the first three tasks in Table ES-1). This report summarizes the progress on these tasks by the experimental management workgroup.

The purpose of this report was to solicit feedback from the I.T., NWPPC, and other regional managers on the PATH experimental management work completed thus far. Specifically, we ask the following questions:
• Are there any actions on the PATH list of candidate actions that are obviously infeasible because of legal/political/practical constraints?
• Are there any actions that should be added to the PATH list of candidate actions?

Clearly there is more work to do, particularly in terms of developing overall strategies, building quantitative assessment tools, and completing the analyses of the relative risks and benefits of alternative experimental actions (i.e., Tasks 4-7 in Table ES-1). However, this report is only the first round of creative exploration of experimental actions. The immediate next step is to narrow the list of potential experimental actions further before proceeding with further quantitative assessments.