Interspecies Management and Land Use Strategies to Protect Endangered Species

We consider an ecosystem management problem where managers can use habitat creation and predator removal to conserve an endangered species. Predator removal may become particularly important in the face of habitat loss, and ecosystem management strategies that ignore the influence of habitat are likely to be inefficient. Using a bioeconomic model, we show that the marginal impact of prey habitat on predators is a key factor in determining the substitutability or complementarity of habitat and removal controls. Applying the model to the case of the endangered Atlantic-Gaspésie Woodland Caribou (rangifer tarandus caribou), we find that the first-best strategy involves extensive caribou habitat protection and a large predator cull initially, and then substituting habitat investments for predator removal as both populations begin to recover, suggesting that habitat protection and predator removal are effectively substitute controls.