CARIBBEAN LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION COOPERATIVE

DERIVING SHARED OBJECTIVES WORKSHOP

Summary of proceedings andpreliminary outputs of a decision analytic process

July, 2015

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This report was prepared by:

Dr. Brent Murry

Science Coordinator

Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative

Dr. Angela Romito

US Fish and Wildlife Service

Southeast Regional Office for Ecological Services

Dr. Mitch Eaton

US Geological Service

South East Climate Science Center

CLCC consultants:

Peter Freeman

Natural Resources Specialist

Wanda I. Crespo Acevedo

Estudios Técnicos, Inc.

Photo credits:

Kasey Jobs, CLCC Partnership and Outreach Coordinator

This report was prepared with the support of the USFS International Institute of Tropical

Forestry and the Southeast Climate Science Center.

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ACRONYMS

ARM Adaptive Resource Management

CAT Conservation Action Teams

CLCC Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative

DNER Department of Natural and Environmental Resources

DPNR Department of Planning and Natural Resources

EEZ Exclusive Economic Zone

EPA Environmental Protection Agency

FO Fundamental Objectives

LCD Landscape Conservation Design

NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

NRCS National Resources Conservation Service

PR Puerto Rico

PrOACT Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences and Trade-offs

(optimization)

SC Steering Committee

SDM Structured Decision Making

SHPO State Historic Preservation Office

UNEP United Nations Environmental Program

USFWS US Fish and Wildlife Service

USGS US Geological Survey

USVI United States Virgin Islands

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary ................................................................................................................. 1

Background ........................................................................................................................... 1

Objectives .............................................................................................................................. 1

Process .................................................................................................................................... 2

Summary of Results ............................................................................................................... 3

Recommendations and Next Steps.................................................................................. 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 13

Appendices

Appendix 1: Summary of workshop: Days 1-4

List of figures

Figure 1. Fundamental Objective Hierarchy for CLCC ........................................................... 5

Figure 2. Objective weights for the four CLCC Fundamental Objectives, based on survey

responses from 7 Steering Committee members ..................................................................... 7

Figure 3. Means Objective Hierarchy for Fundamental Objective ....................................... 8

Figure 4. Means Objective Hierarchy for Fundamental Objective ....................................... 9

Figure 5. Means Objective Hierarchy for Fundamental Objective ..................................... 10

Figure 6. Conceptual diagram showing the relationship between the three major

phases of landscape conservation design, convening, assessment, and proto-typing,

and the stages of the PrOACT decision framework cycle. . ............................................... 11

List of tables

Table 1. List of participants (in alphabetical order) ................................................................. 3

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Executive Summary

Background

The Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative (CLCC) recently completed the

CLCC Science Strategy: Mission Alignment to outline shared conservation values

among CLCC partner entities. After meeting this important benchmark, Steering

Committee (SC) members and outside reviewers suggested that the CLCC adopt a

structured approach for integrating shared values and providing greater context and

guidance for Science Strategy planning and implementation. This report summarizes

the early design and development phases of a Structured Decision Making (SDM)

approach applied during a June 2015 SC face-to-face meeting (hereafter referred to

as the “CLCC SDM Workshop”) and outlines the next steps in the process.

SDM is a formal, proactive, values-based approach to decision-making that involves

decomposing problems into component parts to allow for assessment and resolution of

decision impediments with appropriate analytical tools. Hammond et al. (1999) coined

the acronym PrOACT to collectively describe a 5-step SDM process. Elements of this

process include: 1) Problem definition (Pr), 2) identification and structuring of Objectives

(O), 3) development of management Alternatives (A), 4) evaluation of the

Consequences of alternatives relative to objectives (C), and 5) assessment of Tradeoffs

to identify an optimal solution (T). By adopting an SDM approach, the CLCC aims to

achieve transparent, purposeful, and collaborative co-production of conservation-

specifically, multi-partner Landscape Conservation Design (LCD) in the U.S. Caribbean.

The early development phases of the SDM process, including Problem definition and

Objective identification, allow for identification of common values among CLCC

partner entities. Those values will guide conservation actions, and, ultimately, act as a

foundation for CLCC operations.

Objectives

The purpose of using an SDM approach with SC members is to guide creation of a

framework for developing, assessing, and implementing management decisions using

LCD in the U.S. Caribbean. Although the individual agencies and organizations

represented on the SC independently implement conservation decisions, no single

entity has the perspective, resources or jurisdiction to realize LCD independently. A goal

of the CLCC is to provide a structure for identifying the collective values of all partner

entities and stakeholders in order to evaluate priorities, strategies, and actions that best

meet the shared conservation vision of the Cooperative. The principal purpose,

therefore, of the SDM process is to identify alternative strategies and management

actions for CLCC Conservation Action Teams (CATs) to implement, and – as

appropriate - partner organizations to support, given their mission, capacities,

opportunities, and annual work plans.

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With the above goals in mind, and with consideration that SDM is a formal process that

involves the sequential realization of each of the 5 steps listed above, there were three

main objectives for the CLCC SDM Workshop:

1. Familiarize participating SC members with the foundational elements and

concepts of decision theory to increase support for the approach and facilitate

active participation in the early design phases of the SDM Process.

2. Complete Step 1 of the SDM process by developing a consensus decision

statement. This step involved the development of an explicit description of the

nature of the decisions to be made and details of the strategic framework,

including governance structure [who is (are) the decision maker(s)?], relevant

temporal and spatial scales, and any other considerations that may constrain

the problem.

3. Complete (or get as close to completion as possible) Step 2 of the SDM process

by developing and structuring a set of actionable Objectives that reflect CLCC

shared values and priorities.

Post-workshop goals include engaging CLCC SC members through the remainder of

the PrOACT cycle, to result ultimately in a clear actionable conservation strategy.

Immediate post-workshop goals are described briefly in the “Next Steps” section of this

Executive Summary and are discussed in more detail on p. 51-53 (Error! Reference

source not found.) of Appendix 1.

Process

CLCC SC members participated in a facilitated SDM workshop at the U.S. Forest

Service’s Catalina Field Station, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, on June 3-4,

2015 and June 9-10, 2015. 1

Through support provided by the Southeast Climate Science Center and US Fish and

Wildlife Service, decision coaches (ecologists trained in the decision sciences), Angela

Romito (US Fish and Wildlife Service, Southeast Regional Office) and Mitchell Eaton

(Dept. of Interior, Southeast Climate Science Center) were recruited to co-facilitate the

workshop. Two project coordinators: USVI consultant, Peter Freeman, and Puerto Rico

consultant, Wanda I. Crespo Acevedo, were also recruited to provide project support.

Thirteen SC members participated in the workshop, either in person or online (Table 1).

1 A full meeting agenda is available at: http://caribbeanlcc.org/agendaschedule-clcc-structured-decision-making-

workshop/

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Table 1. List of participants (in alphabetical order)

Name Agency/Entity Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4

In person

Ernesto Díaz PRDNER

Evelyn Huertas EPA

José A. Cruz Burgos USFWS

Pedro Ríos USFS

Sigfredo Torres USGS

Soledad

Gaztambide1 Para La Naturaleza

Susan Silander USFWS

Remote

Errol Chichester USVI Dept. of Agriculture

Lisamarie Carruba NOAA, NMFS

Magaly Figueroa USFS

Patricia Bradley EPA

Roy A. Pemberton Jr USVI, DPNR, Div. of Fish and

Wildlife

Sean Krigger USVI, SHPO 1Participated online in Day 4.

Summary of Results

Facilitated group discussion, deliberation, and round robin voting resulted in

collaborative SC development of a number of preliminary outputs of a decision

analytic process, outlined below.

(1) Decision Statement

The first task in the SDM process is to frame the decision problem by developing a

decision statement. Problem framing provides an a priori, explicit, and shared

understanding of the decision problem, while also identifying spatial, temporal,

organizational, jurisdictional, and legal constraints. CLCC SC members participated in

pre-workshop and workshop exercises that resulted in the following consensus decision

statement:

Decision Statement

“The Caribbean LCC Steering Committee will develop and implement

coordinated, efficient, and effective landscape-scale conservation

design and strategy to conserve, restore and sustain ecological and

cultural resources and services and human well-being in the Caribbean

inside and outside of CLCC jurisdictional boundaries. The CLCC

recognizes the following constraints and uncertainties: political and social

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environments, finances, multiple decision making authorities, diverse

values, competing priorities, and climatic and ecological dynamics.”

Temporal extent

Workshop participants also identified three time horizons for the decision scope.

1) A planning time horizon that is 5 to 10 years in length.

2) An implementation time horizon that begins at the end of planning and lasts for

10 - 20 years. The SC envisioned that LCD will be institutionalized during this

horizon.

3) A time horizon during which the impacts of management implementation will be

realized. The length of the impact horizon will be management-specific, and

impacts may be realized as early the beginning of implementation to 60 years

(to correspond with the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agency

LCD horizon) or longer. Prediction of impacts for long-term or dynamic

management manipulations may be evaluated using a quasi-infinite time

horizon.

Adaptive resource management (ARM), a form of SDM applied to dynamic decisions,

will be used when structural uncertainty impedes decision making. In ARM frameworks,

uncertainties about system dynamics are explicitly represented as competing models of

alternative scenarios (sets of actions). Monitoring programs are designed to discern

which of the alternative scenarios produce better predictions and to evaluate the

success of management schemes (Nichols and Williams 2006). Reducing uncertainty

about how a system responds to management increases returns by modifying

management based on the new understanding of how the system works.

Spatial extent

The spatial extent of the decision problem was defined by workshop participants as:

“The terrestrial and marine components within the EEZ of the U.S.

Caribbean, and Navassa Island, with consideration of relevant drivers,

policies and impacts originating in the wider Caribbean region. The wider

Caribbean is defined by UNEP.”

Decision makers, implementers, and stakeholders

Another important component of problem definition is the identification of individuals

and/or agencies that have the legal authority and resources to make decisions and

implement actions (i.e., decision makers and decision implementers). The perspectives

of stakeholders who may be strongly affected by potential decision outcomes should

also be considered in such processes. Workshop participants identified the following

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decision makers, decision implementers, and stakeholders as being important for CLCC

Strategic Science Planning:

The CLCC Steering Committee was identified as the primary decision maker,

developer, and keeper of the CLCC Strategic Science Plan.

Organizations represented by SC members, along with a broader cooperative

membership in the Caribbean region, were identified as decision implementers.

Stakeholders were defined as any entity that may be strongly affected by CLCC

decision outcomes.

(2) Objectives Hierarchy

In SDM, Strategic Objectives represent the ultimate goals of an organization. These

objectives should guide everything they do, but are often only indirectly related to

outcomes of a particular decision (Keeney 1992, Gregory et al. 2012). Fundamental

Objectives are statements of core values that characterize essential reasons for interest

in the decision, and should be complete and sufficient to fully evaluate any decision

(Keeney 1992). The third type of objective - Means Objectives - are of interest only to

the extent that they help us to achieve our Fundamental Objectives (Conroy et al.

2013). An Objectives Hierarchy is a useful way of graphically structuring the

relationships between Strategic, Fundamental and Means Objectives; Hierarchies serve

to help identify new alternatives and can form the basis of conceptual models that link

decisions to outcomes. The final Fundamental Objective Hierarchy constructed and

agreed upon by the SC is provided in Figure 1. For graphical clarity, Means Objectives

identified as needed for achieving the Fundamental Objectives are described below.

Related discussions from the workshop are summarized on p. 38-53 (Error! Reference

source not found.) of Appendix 1.

Figure 1. Fundamental Objective Hierarchy for CLCC

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2a. Addition of Means Objectives to the Hierarchy

Means Objectives are values or desires that are necessary to achieving Fundamental

Objectives. Means Objectives are included in the Hierarchy to represent relationships

between them, and to the associated Fundamental Objective(s).

SC members identified and added a draft set of Means Objectives to the hierarchy for

three Fundamental Objectives:

1. Maximize public satisfaction and wellbeing (Figure 2)

2. Maximize structure and function of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems

(Figure 3)

3. Maximize use of available operational resources (Figure 4)

Related discussions from the workshop are summarized on p. 38-53 of Appendix 1. The

Fundamental Objective to maximize the integrity of cultural and historic resources was

not expanded upon because most of the SC members with expertise in this arena were

not able to attend. The decision was made to defer work on this Fundamental

Objective until the proper experts could join in the discussion.

2b. Preference weights

Objectives are unlikely to be equally valued by a given stakeholder, and all

stakeholders are unlikely to agree on the same set of values across all objectives. Multi-

criteria decision analysis requires that decision makers rank or weight multiple objectives

according to their preferences. The relative values (or weights) placed on objectives

are a critical part of values-focused decision making. Because the CLCC comprises

multiple decision makers, it is necessary to recognize and quantify the plurality of values

represented by member organizations such that the effects of different value structures

on collective decision making can be identified and addressed (Breininger et al. 2014,

Moore et al. 2013, Conroy and Peterson 2013). Preference weights for each of the four

Fundamental Objectives and on associated Means Objectives were elicited from SC

members present on workshop Day 4. See Weights elicitation exercise in Appendix 1 for

an explanation of the methods used to elicit SC member values and translate these into

objective weights.

Based on the preferences of 7 participating SC members, the Fundamental Objective

of ‘Aquatic/Terrestrial Structure and Function’ received the greatest weight, with an

average of 0.30 (SD = 0.05). Objectives of ‘Public Satisfaction and Well-Being’ and

‘Cultural and Historic Resources’ received equal weight of 0.25, though the range of

participant responses was more variable for the former (SD = 0.08) than the latter (SD =

0.03). ‘Available Operational Resources’ had the lowest preference of the four

Fundamental Objectives (mean = 0.20), but the range of SC member value for this

objective overlapped the averages of both ‘Public Satisfaction’ and ‘Cultural/Historic

Resources’ (SD = 0.07)(Fig. 2).

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The distribution of preferences for the highest level Means Objectives were, on average,

approximately equal within groupings. For example, beneath the Fundamental

Objective of ‘Public Well-Being and Satisfaction’, the three primary Means Objectives

received average weights between 0.31 and 0.34. Given the average weight

attributed to this Fundamental Objective (0.25), the weight of the three Means

Objectives were transformed to lie in the range of 0.07 and 0.08 relative to the full set of

Means Objective weights at this level in the Hierarchy (Appendix 1). Within

‘Aquatic/Terrestrial Structure and Function’, terrestrial systems were slightly more

preferred (0.27) than coastal or marine systems, with marine being the least valued by

this group of SC (0.22). Habitat connectivity was valued nearly as high as terrestrial

systems (0.26). It is important to recognize, however, that the valuation of Means

Objectives among SC members included significant variability which is likely to have a

substantial impact on the recommendation of selected CLCC conservation activities.

Because relying on average preference values may not be appropriate for evaluating

decisions, a process for reaching group consensus will be needed.

A description of the elicitation methodology, weights are provided and described on p.

48 [Error! Reference source not found.of Appendix 1.

Figure 2. Objective weights for the four CLCC Fundamental Objectives, based on survey

responses from 7 Steering Committee members. Blue bars represent mean values across

respondents and thin black bars depict highest and lowest relative preferences among this

group.

0.000

0.050

0.100

0.150

0.200

0.250

0.300

0.350

0.400

0.450

0.500

Public Satisfaction& W-B

Structure &Function

OperationalResources

Cultural andHistorical

Ob

ject

ive

wt.

Figure 3. Means Objective Hierarchy for Fundamental Objective

“Maximize public satisfaction and wellbeing”

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Figure 4. Means Objective Hierarchy for Fundamental Objective

“Maximize structure and function of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems”

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Figure 5. Means Objective Hierarchy for Fundamental Objective

“Maximize use of available operational resources”

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Recommendations and Next Steps

The completion and outcomes of this workshop serve as an important foundation to

guide our shared conservation strategy; however, completing the PrOACT process will

require continued commitment from CLCC partners.

Figure 6. Conceptual diagram showing the relationship between the three major phases of

landscape conservation design, convening, assessment, and proto-typing, and the stages of the

PrOACT decision framework cycle. The CLCC Steering Committee and Conservation Action

teams each have a unique, critical, and complementary roles to perform.

Staff will continue to foster partner engagement by setting up individual meetings with

SC members, especially those that missed some or all of the workshop, to assure that

everyone has the latest information and opportunity to engage. Time will be set aside

on all monthly SC calls for discussion of progress and process evolution. Once all

members are fully informed on the process and progress to date, per SC decree, Tiger

Teams will be developed, composed of SC members and other conservation partners

as appropriate, to fully flesh out the Objectives Hierarchies for each Fundamental

Objective. Tiger Teams will present their final recommendations (Objectives Hierarchy

and CAT membership suggestions) to the full SC for final discussion and approval.

Once approval is reached, CATs will be assembled to address the subsequent

technical aspects of strategy development. The CATs will then use their technical

knowledge related to specific Means Objectives (likely sets of Means Objectives) to: (1)

establish appropriate Performance Indicators (appropriate variables for measuring

success) for each Means Objective, (2) evaluate and quantify spatially-explicit baseline

conditions for each Indicator, (3) define desirable long-term targets or goals (within the

timeframes specified in the Problem definition) for each Indicator, (4) develop a set of

Convene

Assessment

Prototype

T

AC

PrOA

Participation

SC

CATs

CATs

SC

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spatially-explicit strategies to achieve stated targets, and (5) throughout all steps of the

process identify science and knowledge short-comings or gaps.

CLCC staff will function to coordinate efforts among the Tiger Teams and CATs, in

addition to pre-existing CATs (e.g. Cays and Protected Areas) and facilitate oversight

from the recently approved (yet to be established) Science Advisory Panel. As science

and conservation strategies and products become available through this process and

approved by the SC and Science Advisory Panel, the CLCC staff will also assure that

products are made available on the CLCC data portal and that science delivery is

made relevant through all stages of product development. As time and funding allow,

every effort will be made to retain a trained SDM expert in the appropriate steps (e.g.

finalizing the Objectives Hierarchy; developing Alternative portfolios of strategies;

evaluating Consequences of strategy implementation; and evaluating Trade-offs to

identify optimal suites of strategies).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breininger, D. R., B. Duncan, M. J. Eaton, F. A. Johnson, and J. D. Nichols. 2014.

Integrating Land Cover Modeling and Adaptive Management to Conserve

Endangered Species and Reduce Catastrophic Fire Risk. Land 3:874–897.

Conroy, M. J., and J. T. Peterson. 2013. Decision Making in Natural Resource

Management: A Structured, Adaptive Approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Gregory, R., L. Failing, M. Harstone, G. Long, T. McDaniels, and D. Ohlson. 2012.

Structured Decision Making: A Practical Guide to Environmental Management

Choices. John Wiley & Sons.

Hammond, J. S., R. L. Keeney, and H. Raiffa. 1999. Smart Choices: a practical guide to

making better life decisions. Broadway Books, New York.

Johnson, F. A., M. J. Eaton, J. Williams, G. Jensen, and J. Madsen. 2015. Training

Conservation Practitioners to be Better Decision Makers. Sustainability 7:8354–8373.

Keeney, R. L. 1992. Value-focused thinking: a path to creative decision making. Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Moore, C. T., T. L. Shaffer, and J. J. Gannon. 2013. Spatial Education: Improving

Conservation Delivery Through Space-Structured Decision Making. Journal of Fish

and Wildlife Management 4:130521093301000.