DANIEL GOODMAN MEMORIAL SYMPOSIUM DECISION-MAKING UNDER UNCERTAINTY: RISK ASSESSMENT AND THE BEST AVAILABLE SCIENCE 20-21 MARCH 2014 MUSEUM OF THE ROCKIES MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY BOZEMAN, MONTANA You are cordially invited to attend the Daniel Goodman Memorial Symposium, Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Risk Assessment and the Best Available Science. We have a fantastic group of speakers lined up to discuss this theme as it applies to marine mammal and fisheries management, Endangered Species Act policy and management, ecosystem modeling, Bayesian statistics, and environmental risk assessment. The symposium was inspired by the work of the late Dr. Daniel Goodman, much of whose applied work was focused on marine mammal and fisheries conservation, and has been designed to honor his contributions to these topics and to explore how his work and ideas might be used to improve natural resource decision-making and the science of conservation biology. This symposium will be relevant to anyone working on environmental or natural resource management and policy issues. The symposium will take place at the Museum of the Rockies on the Montana State University campus in Bozeman, MT, March 20-21, 2014. To register for the symposium and to find a detailed symposium agenda, information about discounted hotel rooms, and other travel details, visit our website (http://www.montana.edu/lettersandscience/Goodman/index.html). Thanks to our generous sponsors, there will be no charge to attend the symposium or the Thursday-evening reception; we only ask that you register so we know how many people to expect. If you are a student or know of any students who may be interested in the topics covered in the symposium, we have four travel grants available to help cover or defray the cost of attending the symposium. (Post-docs may also apply, but will be given lower priority than students.) See the Student Travel Grant page on our website for more details. Travel grant applications will be due February 5th. We hope to see you there. http://www.montana.edu/lettersandscience/Goodman _______________________________________________________ "Uncertainty is pervasive in natural resource management; attainment of the management goals often depends both on present quantities that cannot be measured accurately and on future environmental disturbances that cannot be predicted accurately. When we make management decisions under such circumstances, we recognize that the outcome may be quite different from our intentions, and we perceive this possibility as risk. But, decisions must be made all the same, so we attempt to take the uncertainty, and hence the risk, into account in our decision, through bet hedging and setting margins of safety..[T]he decision process can still be, in its own way, an exact science, notwithstanding the uncertainty. Given that we cannot eradicate uncertainty, the sense in which decision making under uncertainty can be an exact science is a matter of coping with the uncertainty in a way that is recognizably optimal." -Dr. Daniel Goodman, 1945-2012 (Goodman 2002) Goodman, D. 2002. Uncertainty, risk, and decision: the PVA example. In J.M. Berkson L.L. Kline, and D.J. Orth, editors, Incorporating uncertainty into fishery models. American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, Maryland.