Testing Management-Oriented Hypotheses with Simulation Models

We need to manage and to use our renewable resources more wisely and yet more intensively in the future. To do this we need to incorporate more of our experience, our data, and our theory into the decision-making process. We can use simulation models in this synthesis effort to advantage. We can perform management experiments with ecosystem level models, generate meaningful output from those experiments, and condense and interpret this output in a manner useful to the management agency personnel. The result will be better resource management decisions based on scientifically and technically defendable information which will have greater internal consistency and which will produce better results under many conditions. OHIO J. SCI. 78(4): 190, 1978 It is a basic tenet that renewable resource managers work with stressed ecosystems. Herein, stress is defined as a major change in ecosystem structure and function caused by technological man in contrast to those changes caused by nature. renewable resource managers must be concerned with complexes of ecosystems. Resource managers are extracting useful products from these ecosystems. They must modify and manipulate them to do this. And they must do this at an ever increasing rate to provide products for