Victoria Hemming

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences

Introduction Natural resource management uses expert judgement to estimate facts that inform important decisions. Unfortunately, expert judgement is often derived by informal and largely untested protocols, despite evidence that the quality of judgements can be improved with structured approaches. We attribute the lack of uptake of structured proto...

Performance weighted aggregation of expert judgments, using calibration questions, has been advocated to improve pooled quantitative judgments for ecological questions. However, there is little discussion or practical advice in the ecological literature regarding the application, advantages or challenges of performance weighting. In this paper we (...

ContextFire behaviour research has largely focused on dry ecosystems that burn frequently, with far less attention on wetter forests. Yet, the impacts of fire in wet forests can be high and therefore understanding the drivers of fire in these systems is vital.Objectives We sought to identify and rank by importance the factors plausibly driving flam...

Biodiversity conservation decisions are difficult, especially when they involve differing values, complex multidimensional objectives, scarce resources, urgency, and considerable uncertainty. Decision science embodies a theory about how to make difficult decisions and an extensive array of frameworks and tools that make that theory practical. We so...

This paper explores judgements about the replicability of social and behavioural sciences research and what drives those judgements. Using a mixed methods approach, it draws on qualitative and quantitative data elicited from groups using a structured approach called the IDEA protocol (‘investigate’, ‘discuss’, ‘estimate’ and ‘aggregate’). Five grou...

City leaders are setting ambitious plans to achieve critical urban sustainability goals such as reducing urban heat, mitigating flooding during storms, and conserving biodiversity, and increasingly rely on urban forests as a key nature‐based solution to such challenges. Current paradigms of urban forest management typically prioritize goals like in...

Like many forage fish species, Pacific sand lance (Ammodytes personatus) play a key role in nearshore marine ecosystems as an important prey source for a diverse array of predators in the northeastern Pacific. However, the primary threats to Pacific sand lance and their habitat are poorly defined due to a lack of systematic data. Crucial informatio...

Decision analysis provides a robust framework for complex decisions related to environmental sustainability and conservation, including for energy and water, fisheries and wildlife management, agriculture, and climate change response. The complexities of these problems stem from their large scope and scale, which leads to multiple decision makers,...

Decision analysis provides a robust framework for complex decisions related to environmental sustainability and conservation, including for energy and water, fisheries and wildlife management, agriculture, and climate change response. The complexities of these problems stem from their large scope and scale, which leads to multiple decision makers,...

Effective biodiversity conservation requires robust and transparent prioritization of management actions. However, this is often hampered by a lack of spatially‐explicit data on habitat variables and empirical data on the effect of management actions. Although approaches exist that integrate structured expert elicitation (SEE) with species distribu...

Here, we demonstrate how IDEAcology aids in preparing for and implementing a structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol, an iterative quantitative expert elicitation framework. Expert judgement is used to inform decision-making on environmental assessment and management when imminent decisions are required, and quantitative data are abse...

The offshore Multiuse Setting (MUS) is a concept that seeks to co-locate marine industrial activities including wind farms, aquaculture, and tourism. MUS are thought to be an innovative way to promote efficiency in resource use. Despite this contention, plans for MUS are plagued by an implementation gap whereby innovative ideas do not actualise int...

As replications of individual studies are resource intensive, techniques for predicting the replicability are required. We introduce the repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) process, a new method for eliciting expert predictions about the replicability of research. This process is a structured expert elicitation approach ba...

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed...

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed...

Journal peer review regulates the flow of ideas through an academic discipline and thus has the power to shape what a research community knows, actively investigates, and recommends to policymakers and the wider public. We might assume that editors can identify the ‘best’ experts and rely on them for peer review. But decades of research on both exp...

Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) support coastal and freshwater ecosystems, economies and cultures, but many populations have declined. We used priority threat management (PTM), a decision‐support framework for prioritizing conservation investments, to identify management strategies that could support thriving populations of wild salmon over 25 y...

Despite their importance in many ecological processes, collecting data and information on ecological interactions is an exceedingly challenging task. For this reason, large parts of the world have a data deficit when it comes to species interactions and how the resulting networks are structured. As data collection alone is unlikely to be sufficient...

Metawebs, i.e. networks of potential interactions within a species pool, are a powerful abstraction to understand how large-scales species interaction networks are structured.Because metawebs are typically expressed at large spatial and taxonomic scales, assembling them is a tedious and costly process; predictive methods can help circumvent the lim...

The estimation of parameters and model structure for informing infectious disease response has become a focal point of the recent pandemic. However, it has also highlighted a plethora of challenges remaining in the fast and robust extraction of information using data and models to help inform policy. In this paper, we identify and discuss four broa...

Despite their importance in many ecological processes, collecting data and information on ecological interactions, and therefore species interaction networks, is an exceedingly challenging task. For this reason, large parts of the world have a deficit of data of which species interact, and what we can expect the network structure of these interacti...

This paper explores judgements about the replicability of social and behavioural sciences research, and what drives those judgements. Using a mixed methods approach, it draws on qualitative and quantitative data elicited using a structured iterative approach for eliciting judgements from groups, called the IDEA protocol (‘Investigate’, ‘Discuss’, ‘...

Expert elicitation is deployed when data are absent or uninformative and critical decisions must be made. In designing an expert elicitation, most practitioners seek to achieve best practice while balancing practical constraints. The choices made influence the required time and effort investment, the quality of the elicited data, experts’ engagemen...

Replication is a hallmark of scientific research. As replications of individual studies are resource intensive, techniques for predicting the replicability are required. We introduce a new technique to evaluating replicability, the repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) process, a structured expert elicitation approach based...

Quantitative expert judgements are used in reliability assessments to inform critically important decisions. Structured elicitation protocols have been advocated to improve expert judgements, yet their application in reliability is challenged by a lack of examples or evidence that they improve judgements. This paper aims to overcome these barriers....

Defining scoring rules. (PDF)

Elicitation documents. (PDF)

Demographic data and analysis. (PDF)

It is generally agreed that an elicitation protocol for quantifying uncertainty will always benefit from the involvement of more than one domain expert. The two key mechanisms by which judgements may be pooled across experts are through striving for consensus, via behavioural aggregation, where experts share and discuss information, and via mathema...

1. Expert judgment informs a variety of important applications in conservation and natural resource management, including threatened species management, environmental impact assessment, and structured decision-making. However, expert judgments can be prone to contextual biases. Structured elicitation protocols mitigate these biases and improve the...

The protection and management of grasslands is a priority to conserve biodiversity, particularly in fragmented landscapes subject to human-induced disturbance. We examined the success of salvage and reinstatement of multiple 90 m2 slabs of modified temperate grassland in a pipeline construction corridor in south-eastern Australia and compared it wi...