Balancing Large-Scale Wildlife Protection and Forest Management Goals with a Game-Theoretic Approach

When adopted, wildlife protection policies in Canadian forests typically cover large areas and affect multiple economic agents working these landscapes. Such measures are likely to increase the costs of timber for forestry companies operating area, which may hinder their acceptance unless harvesting remains profitable. We propose a bi-level problem that accounts profit-maximizing behavior an area subject protection. consider regulator with mandate licensed harvest public forest lands. depict relationship between as leader-follower Stackelberg game. The leader sets protected target each license followers adjust strategies maximize payoffs while meeting set by leader. leader’s objective is area-wide spatially contiguous habitat accounting followers’ behavior. apply approach investigate woodland caribou Churchill range, Ontario, Canada. compare game-theoretic solutions do not companies’ objectives also equalizing revenue losses among companies.