Capturing expert uncertainty in spatial cumulative impact assessments.

Area of Science:

• Marine ecology
• Conservation science
• Environmental management

Background:

• Assessing cumulative human impacts on marine ecosystems is crucial for conservation and blue economies.
• Existing methods often lack robust ways to handle expert knowledge uncertainty.
• Spatial cumulative impact assessments require understanding multiple threats and ecosystem vulnerabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and test a method for spatial cumulative impact assessment that explicitly incorporates expert knowledge uncertainty.
• To generate cumulative impact maps and uncertainty maps for Spencer Gulf, South Australia.
• To improve the transparency and interpretation of impact assessments for resource management.

Main Methods:

• Experts provided best-case, most-likely, and worst-case scores for 32 threats on eight ecosystems.
• Expert scores were combined with spatial data on threat patterns and intensity.
• Cumulative impact maps were generated for three scenarios, alongside uncertainty simulations.

Main Results:

• The developed method produced smaller uncertainty bounds compared to other approaches.
• The results led to more constrained and interpretable cumulative impact assessments.
• Explicitly accounting for expert uncertainty enhanced the reliability of the impact maps.

Conclusions:

• Incorporating expert knowledge uncertainty improves spatial cumulative impact assessments.
• This approach enhances transparency and simplifies the interpretation of results.
• The method facilitates sustainable resource management and marine conservation efforts.