Wellbeing, values, and planning in environmental management.

Concepts of 'human values' and 'wellbeing' are central in environmental planning, especially during the group deliberations that underpin expert and participatory processes. However, there are long-standing, unresolved controversies concerning both concepts with many debates being highly theoretical. Therefore, we suggest it is more productive to develop definitions and models that are task-specific (mid-level theory). To this end, we use purpose-built value sets and models to explain the relationships among values and wellbeing, and to demarcate values, desires, and personality. The derived concepts are designed for group deliberations and could readily be combined with existing decision support tools, such as structured decision making. Outputs from the work also inform current debates within the environmental domain including, for example, those surrounding the intrinsic value of nature, and ideas concerning plural values versus a single overarching value (monism). We also define 'wellbeing' as an evaluative statement that supports assessments of trade-offs and co-benefits.

Classifying human wellbeing values for planning the conservation and use of natural resources.

Understanding how values interact is fundamental to planning the conservation and use of natural resources. However, practitioners who apply value classifications use a diversity of approaches. Does this matter? In answering this question, we propose that well-constructed classifications contribute to planning by: clarifying definitions and underlying concepts; providing a basis for assessing synergies and trade-offs; explaining some ethical constraints, including aspects of governance and power; and providing a framework for cross-cultural analysis. To test these propositions we develop complementary value classifications for end state values and principles together with supporting theory, assumptions, and criteria. The proposed classifications are then compared with alternatives including those based on 'needs', 'capabilities', and total economic value. We find that the alternatives fail against key criteria and this hampers their capacity to fulfil the four roles proposed above. Therefore, we conclude that although value classifications are important and may vary depending on purpose, they need to be well-constructed - that is, supporting theory, assumptions, and criteria should be explicit.

Category mistakes: A barrier to effective environmental management.

How entities, the things that exist, are defined and categorised affects all aspects of environmental management including technical descriptions, quantitative analyses, participatory processes, planning, and decisions. Consequently, ambiguous definitions and wrongly assigning entities to categories, referred to as category mistakes, are barriers to effective management. Confusion caused by treating the term 'biodiversity' variously as the property of an area, the biota of an area, and a preferred end state (a value) - quite different categories of entities - is one example. To overcome such difficulties, we develop and define four entity categories - elements, processes, properties, and values - and two derived categories - states and systems. We argue that adoption of these categories and definitions will significantly improve environmental communication and analysis, and thus strengthen planning and decision-making.

The contribution of nature to people: Applying concepts of values and properties to rate the management importance of natural elements.

An important, and yet unresolved question in natural resource management is how best to manage natural elements and their associated values to ensure human wellbeing. Specifically, there is a lack of measurement tools to assess the contribution of nature to people. We present one approach to overcome this global issue and show that the preferred state of any system element, in terms of realising human values, is a function of element properties. Consequently, natural resource managers need to understand the nature of the relationships between element properties and values if they are to successfully manage for human wellbeing. In two case studies of applied planning, we demonstrate how to identify key element properties, quantify their relationships to priority human values, and combine this information to model the contribution of elements to human wellbeing. In one of the two case studies we also compared the modelling outputs with directly elicited stakeholder opinions regarding the importance of the elements for realising the given priority values. The two, largely congruent outputs provide additional support for the approach. The study shows that rating sets of elements on their relative overall value for human wellbeing, or utility, provides critical information for subsequent management decisions and a basis for productive new research. We consider that the described approach is broadly applicable within the domain of natural resource management.

A structured elicitation method to identify key direct risk factors for the management of natural resources.

The high level of uncertainty inherent in natural resource management requires planners to apply comprehensive risk analyses, often in situations where there are few resources. In this paper, we demonstrate a broadly applicable, novel and structured elicitation approach to identify important direct risk factors. This new approach combines expert calibration and fuzzy based mathematics to capture and aggregate subjective expert estimates of the likelihood that a set of direct risk factors will cause management failure. A specific case study is used to demonstrate the approach; however, the described methods are widely applicable in risk analysis. For the case study, the management target was to retain all species that characterise a set of natural biological elements. The analysis was bounded by the spatial distribution of the biological elements under consideration and a 20-year time frame. Fourteen biological elements were expected to be at risk. Eleven important direct risk factors were identified that related to surrounding land use practices, climate change, problem species (e.g., feral predators), fire and hydrological change. In terms of their overall influence, the two most important risk factors were salinisation and a lack of water which together pose a considerable threat to the survival of nine biological elements. The described approach successfully overcame two concerns arising from previous risk analysis work: (1) the lack of an intuitive, yet comprehensive scoring method enabling the detection and clarification of expert agreement and associated levels of uncertainty; and (2) the ease with which results can be interpreted and communicated while preserving a rich level of detail essential for informed decision making.

Retroviral delivery of dominant-negative vascular endothelial growth factor receptor type 2 to murine wounds inhibits wound angiogenesis.

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a potent paracrine signal for initiating angiogenesis. Although VEGF can bind to several cell surface receptors, VEGF receptor type 2 (VEGFR2, a.k.a. KDR or flk-1) is the primary receptor responsible for VEGF-induced endothelial cell proliferation. To determine whether the VEGF-VEGFR2 signaling axis has an important role in wound healing angiogenesis, we used a retrovirus to deliver a signaling-defective truncated VEGFR2 (tm VEGFR2) to block VEGF-VEGFR2-induced endothelial cell proliferation in murine wounds. We show that the retroviral construct effectively blocked phosphorylation of VEGFR2 in vitro and we were able to express the truncated receptor in murine wounds. We achieved significant reduction of angiogenesis and granulation tissue formation in murine wounds, but this did not lead to delayed wound closure. In contrast, there was a corresponding increase in wound contraction, showing that functional VEGFR2 intracellular signaling is not critical for normal closure of excisional dermal wounds. Our results show a novel relationship between wound bed vascularity and wound contraction.