Contrafactuais para estudos de avaliação de impacto em ecologia e biologia da conservação

• Autor(a) principal: Ribas, Luiz Guilherme dos Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/11700
• topic: avaliação de impacto; Argumento baseado em evidências; Causalidade; Inferência causal; Raciocínio contrafactual; Impact evaluation; Evidence-based argument; Causality; Causal inference; Counterfactual reasoning; CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA::ECOLOGIA DE ECOSSISTEMAS

Several impact analysis methods based on counterfactuals have been recurrently applied in different areas of knowledge. These methods, under different aspects, tend to give more accurate and precise estimates of the effect of a given intervention and potentially establish causal relationships more convincingly. Counterfactual methods seek, for example, an answer to the following question: what would be the rate of deforestation if an area had not been protected? When comparing counterfactual states with factual states, one can infer about causal relationships to understand how a given event impacts the outcomes in a system of interest. However, only recently and superficially these methods have been applied in Ecology and Conservation Biology. This thesis is divided into four chapters and aims to address the application of counterfactual methods in Ecology and Conservation Biology to estimate the impact of different interventions. The first chapter discusses the possibilities and implications of using counterfactuals in Aquatic Ecology and related areas. The second chapter consisted of a systematic review of the effectiveness of protected areas in mitigating deforestation. In addition, the estimates of effectiveness of protected areas (in avoiding deforestation) given by traditional and counterfactual methods were compared. The third chapter is a review of a set of methods used to estimate counterfactual states. The fourth chapter investigates the impact of the "Day of Fire" on forest fire rates in the Amazon region. In this chapter, new counterfactual approaches (directed acyclic graph and Bayesian structural time-series model), at least in Ecology and Conservation Biology, were applied. In general, this thesis aims to promote the use of counterfactual methods in the environmental area.