A weight-of-evidence system for integrating monitoring and environmental indicators to guide biological conservation and resource management of native taxa

Abstract

Many state and federal environmental management agencies are charged with using data-driven evidence to conserve and restore threatened and endangered species that are adversely impacted by humans. Yet, statistical analyses of available environmental indicator data do not always promote unambiguous, ecologically-meaningful, evidence-based decisions for managing native biota. Here we modified our multi-step quantitative adaptive management framework to identify natural and anthropogenic environmental indicators that maintain or threaten native species. In a proof-of-concept example, we quantified how three native stream fish taxa responded to nine environmental indicators based on three criteria (i.e., statistical significance, ecological relevance, and agreement with expectations). The resulting Weight of Evidence (WoE) integration identified five groups of indicators, clarified ambiguous trends, and identified promising future directions that would not have emerged from examining a single analysis or a single taxon alone. Our evaluation and categorization of environmental indicators established the biological foundation on which multi-disciplinary sustainability rests. Our research contribution demonstrates how following a structured integration framework can lead to novel insights that benefit conservation across organisms and systems even when employing relatively simple analytical techniques. Our results address the following often ignored questions: How do we systematically link together different analytical components of the same larger problems? How do we ecologically integrate similar and dissimilar results across analyses? How can we identify generalities by comparing multiple taxa?