Allocation of research resources for commercially valuable invasions: Norway's red king crab fishery
Introduction
As invasive species spread, research resources may be expended ahead of the invasion frontier or within already-affected ecosystems. The general goal of research expenditures is to improve management decisions regarding the invasion by reducing uncertainties. Ahead of the frontier, research expenditures can identify baseline conditions and values for existing ecosystem resources. This in effect identifies the benefits of stopping the spread of the invasion. Research expenditures within invaded areas may have multiple roles; they may identify control and restoration costs if or when the invader is removed from the system, or they may identify commercial benefits of accommodating the species’ presence, through for example a long-term sustainable harvest. These benefits are foregone in viable habitat areas ahead of the frontier. Understanding trade-offs between research expenditures ahead of the invasion frontier and within invaded areas facilitates improved management of the invasion across its time horizon (Epanchin-Niell, 2017; Burnett et al., 2006, Burnett et al., 2008; Kaiser, 2014) and reduces ad hoc decision-making lacking in economic analysis (Epanchin-Niell, 2017).
This paper expands the standard timeline of management options for an invasive species to formally include research ahead of the invasion frontier, and it integrates this expansion across the invasion timeline by investigating trade-offs in research ahead of the frontier and within an already invaded area. It demonstrates that failure to consider in tandem the benefits of research both ahead of the frontier and in already invaded areas may result in difficulties in optimally prioritizing the allocation of resources to research types with different objectives. The paper develops a research and development (R&D) model adapted from Choi and Gerlach (2014) to analyze the choice of how to allocate research resources across the two regions, given uncertain and unequal research returns, when both types of research are needed. The model illustrates trade-offs between baseline research at the frontier (B) and research in the invaded area (I). Exploiting the duality of production and cost, we express the allocation problem as one of cost-minimization in order to determine where the marginal resource unit is better spent.
Baseline research at the frontier is considered more challenging because it can be anticipated to have lower or more diffuse chances of proving directly applicable to management decisions than research within the invaded area. At the same time, drawing from the Choi and Gerlach (2014) framework we find that under some conditions it will be optimal to allocate more resources to the more challenging research project. In short this is because success benefits from joint production of actionable knowledge in both types of research. An additional resource unit invested in the riskier type does not directly buy greater success, but it can improve the odds of success. At the margin, the success rate across the two research types needs to be equal for an optimal allocation. Thus, research ahead of the frontier should often constitute the greater portion of the research portfolio, despite its lower expected productivity.
Using different methodology, this sets up a corollary finding for research investment decisions to the theoretical conclusions of Finnoff et al. (2007) that risk-averse managers may choose control of an invasive species after its arrival in order to reap smaller certain gains over potentially larger but more uncertain gains from prevention.
We apply the model to research efforts of the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in Norway over the last decades pertaining to the ongoing Red King Crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) invasion in the Barents Sea. This application fosters insights into a second important consideration in the allocation of research resources. That is, when the invasive species has significant commercial potential, research into commercial benefits rather than ecological damages may induce accommodation, and acceptance of further spread, over control of the invaded area and prevention of spread to new areas. This extends our understanding of how invasive species management decisions may inefficiently favor certain economic benefits from a commercially valuable invasive species over uncertain or diffuse ecosystem benefits from controlling the invasion. Our results support policy makers tasked with allocating limited resources across disparate interests by providing a framework for weighing the marginal gains of additional research in relation to each other and the total gains from research productivity.
Further still, the challenge of determining research priorities in resource conservation is a widely applicable one. Given economic constraints on resources, there is a risk for disproportional investments in different types of research, where e.g. more emphasis may be placed on ecological rather than social types of research, or vice-versa (Davis et al., 2019) so that optimal management outcomes are not achieved.
Section snippets
Background
Despite a large scientific literature on the management of invasive species (Finnoff et al., 2005; Epanchin-Niell and Wilen, 2012; Leung et al., 2005; Kaiser and Burnett, 2010; Costello et al., 2017) significantly fewer scholarly works look at the allocation of resources for efficient research into controlling invasions in their expansion phase. One strand of that limited literature focuses on the spatiotemporal dimension of the problem for identifying optimal management strategies (Baker, 2016
Application
The management of any invader requires a multi-faceted approach that generates a coherent policy on both the harvesting – potentially commercial – and the transitory dynamics of the invasion. When the invader has commercial benefits, it pits potential economic gains against uncertain ecosystem changes. In what follows, we attempt to illustrate how the economic rationale behind the allocation of research resources for acquiring the different types of information needed to address this interplay
Discussion
The role of economies of scope is critical for prioritizing and allocating research resources, although not explicitly modeled here. In many cases, even when more than one invasion is considered, monies available are expected to come from the same resource pools (Burnett et al., 2006) and this is also the case for studying different aspects of the same species. Research type B and type I are spatially divided and thus restrict the potential for “direct” economies of scope. Yet, as long as the
Conclusions
The limited knowledge on the impacts of the invasive crab jeopardizes its management and allows space for conflict between different stakeholder groups. Examples of conflict include on the one hand accusations toward the Norwegian government for violating the UN Convention on Biological Diversity with the management it applies on the invasive crab (Miljøvernforbund, 2010; WWF-Norge, 2002), and on the other hand disappointment on behalf of the RKC industry when new regulations targeting at a
Author contributions
Melina Kourantidou: Conceptualization, data collection, methodology, visualization, analysis, writing – original draft preparation, writing – reviewing and editing. Brooks Kaiser: Methodology, analysis, supervision, writing – reviewing and editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors report no declarations of interest.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Belmont Forum [BAAMRGP Project: Belmont Forum #129].
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