Wildlife Disease Bioeconomics

We review the disease ecology and bioeconomic literature on managing wildlife disease problems, and we also describe how wildlife disease problems relate to other health and resource problems. The disease ecology literature advocates managing populations relative to fixed ecological thresholds to produce disease eradication. We show that thresholds are generally endogenous functions of management choices, so that management involves manipulating both populations and thresholds. We also explore the conditions for optimal disease eradication and illustrate how harvest values and stock-related values may influence the optimality of eradication. When eradication is not optimal, we describe how the characteristic features of wildlife disease problems (i.e., multiple, interacting state variables and imperfect controls) make it unlikely that an optimal management plan will involve a monotonic path to a steady-state outcome.