Balancing Large-Scale Wildlife Protection and Forest Management Goals with a Game-Theoretic Approach

When adopted, wildlife protection policies in Canadian forests typically cover large areas and affect multiple economic agents working in these landscapes. Such measures are likely to increase the costs of timber for forestry companies operating in the area, which may hinder their acceptance of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Forests 2021-06, Vol.12 (6), p.809
Main Authors: Yemshanov, Denys, Haight, Robert G., Liu, Ning, Rempel, Robert S., Koch, Frank H., Rodgers, Art
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accounting
bi-level optimization
Decision making
Endangered & extinct species
Forest management
Forest protection
Forestry
Forests
Game theory
Government agencies
habitat connectivity
Habitats
harvest scheduling model I
Maximization
network flow model
Optimization
Policies
Protected areas
Stackelberg game
Timber
Wildlife conservation
Wildlife habitats
Wildlife management
woodland caribou
Woodlands
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Summary:When adopted, wildlife protection policies in Canadian forests typically cover large areas and affect multiple economic agents working in these landscapes. Such measures are likely to increase the costs of timber for forestry companies operating in the area, which may hinder their acceptance of the policies unless harvesting remains profitable. We propose a bi-level wildlife protection problem that accounts for the profit-maximizing behavior of forestry companies operating in an area subject to protection. We consider the regulator with a wildlife protection mandate and forestry companies licensed to harvest public forest lands. We depict the relationship between the regulator and forestry companies as a leader-follower Stackelberg game. The leader sets the protected area target for each license area and the followers adjust their strategies to maximize payoffs while meeting the protection target set by the leader. The leader’s objective is to maximize the area-wide protection of spatially contiguous habitat while accounting for the followers’ profit-maximizing behavior. We apply the approach to investigate habitat protection policies for woodland caribou in the Churchill range, Ontario, Canada. We compare the game-theoretic solutions with solutions that do not consider the forest companies’ objectives and also with solutions equalizing the revenue losses among the companies.
ISSN:1999-4907
1999-4907
DOI:10.3390/f12060809