DOI: 10.5061/dryad.m07bn
title: Data from: How much is new information worth? Evaluating the financial benefit of resolving management uncertainty.

description: 1. Conservation decision-makers face a trade-off between spending limited
 funds on direct management action, or gaining new information in an
 attempt to improve management performance in the future.
 Value-of-information analysis can help to resolve this trade-off by
 evaluating how much management performance could improve if new
 information was gained. Value-of-information analysis has been used
 extensively in other disciplines, but there are only a few examples where
 it has informed conservation planning, none of which have used it to
 evaluate the financial value of gaining new information. 2. We address
 this gap by applying value-of-information analysis to the management of a
 declining koala Phascolarctos cinereus population. Decision-makers
 responsible for managing this population face uncertainty about survival
 and fecundity rates, and how habitat cover affects mortality threats. The
 value of gaining new information about these uncertainties was calculated
 using a deterministic matrix model of the koala population to find the
 expected population growth rate if koala mortality threats were optimally
 managed under alternative model hypotheses, which represented the
 uncertainties faced by koala managers. 3. Gaining new information about
 survival and fecundity rates and the effect of habitat cover on mortality
 threats will do little to improve koala management. Across a range of
 management budgets, no more than 1·7% of the budget should be spent on
 resolving these uncertainties. 4. The value of information was low because
 optimal management decisions were not sensitive to the uncertainties we
 considered. Decisions were instead driven by a substantial difference in
 the cost efficiency of management actions. The value of information was up
 to forty times higher when the cost efficiencies of different koala
 management actions were similar. 5. Synthesis and applications. This study
 evaluates the ecological and financial benefits of gaining new information
 to inform a conservation problem. We also theoretically demonstrate that
 the value of reducing uncertainty is highest when it is not clear which
 management action is the most cost efficient. This study will help expand
 the use of value-of-information analyses in conservation by providing a
 cost efficiency metric by which to evaluate research or monitoring.
description: Value-of-information
 & sensitivity analysis codeThis script enables the
 user to carry out Value fo Information analysis to evaluate the benefits
 of resolving uncertainty surrounding a declining koala population in
 south-east Queensland. The script is supposed to be flexible and
 implementable by managers, thus it takes a management budget level as an
 input, and returns the maximum expected population growth rate possible
 for that level of investment, with current levels of information. It then
 evaluates the population growth rate that could be achieved if uncertainty
 were to be resolved. Comparing these two levels of management performance
 is a way of subjectivly evaluating the benefits of resolving uncertainty.
 The code uses the concept of Expected Value of Perfect information to
 evaluate the benefits of resolving all uncertainty, and to evaluate the
 benefits of resolving structural uncertainty, where structural uncertainty
 is uncertainty about how forest cover affects koala birth and death rates
 (refered to as EVPXI_model in code). The code also uses the concept of
 Expected Value of Partial Information to evaluate the benefits of
 resolving particular links between forest cover, and koala mortality
 related to disease, vehicle collisions or dog attacks. The code also
 converts a benefit, in terms of population growth rate, into a benefit in
 terms of dollars (millions). This makes it easier for the manager to know
 an upper limit of money to allocate to information gain, and similarly, if
 it would be more cost effective to just invest in direct management action
 without gaining additional informationMaxwell_etal_VOI_code.zip