A bioeconomic analysis of wildlife management in a Natural Park: San Rossore Estate, Tuscany, Italy

The management of wildlife species as pests involves making choices that determine how much pests control will cost, and what kind of benefits it will deliver. In order to make these choices defensible, the effect courses of action have on how the costs and benefits of pests control accrue should ideally be understood. This study proposes a novel approach to estimate the choice of a wildlife management of an ungulate species in a conservation site (Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli Regional Park, Tuscany), combining biological and economical trends. In fact the management of wildlife resources provides contrasting benefits and costs, which ecological or economic approaches alone cannot analyze in their complexity and, at the same time, can only offer a limited insight. The main problem is that, both in protected areas than in country lands (where there are regulated hunting areas), some vertebrate species are considered as pests. In these cases pests are considered as species able to create different kinds of damage to the environment in which they live. The purpose of this work is to adopt an interdisciplinary integration of research expertise from natural sciences, economics and social sciences to manage a fallow deer population in an ex-hunting Estate in Italy, now part of a Regional Park. The aim of this work is to develop a model to achieve a balance constrained by biological and economical variables. Ecological-biological problems regarding environment and wildlife management are usually solved separately by economic tasks. Because bioeconomic control problems are still new objectives of the wildlife management in Italy, this research aims to give an overview of the classical bioeconomic models to introduce a new technique in decisions regarding wildlife species management and eventually harvesting control programs. Bioeconomic models are central to this approach as they combine biological data about population dynamics, sex and age class segregation, habitat use by the biological population, with economic data, deriving by costs for fences to reduce environmental damages and car accidents, costs for harvesting, revenues by venison and trophy, and etc. The primary objective of this work is to produce a bio-economic framework with sufficient structural complexity to analyze the management of this fallow deer population at our local level. This objective could be achieved developing a deterministic biological model that later would be implemented on a bioeconomic one. First, we develop a model in which wildlife managers in a Park seek to balance the revenues by the culling with the costs of the management, as the Italian law restrictions require. In a second step we will try to develop a simulating model imagining our Protected Area in Italy as a Sporting Estate in which the landowner desires to maximize his profit by venison and trophy value in an ecological equilibrium. Later we will use the simulating software Vensim to manipulate our fallow deer population in all the ways and conditions we will, combining the population growth, the size of the cull, and the desired profit. Finally, three different approaches to bioeconomic wildlife management plans are analized to show new possible horizons of the wildlife management activities in Italy: an hunter’s utility maximization problem; a wildlife management maximising the social welfare; a wildlife management maximising meat and trophy value in ecological equilibrium. This work provides techniques to people managing conservation and exploitation of environmental resources to realize the optimal balance between all the variables acting (ecological, economic, social,..).