Biological Resource Modeling—A Brief Survey

The use of mathematical models in natural resource management has increased greatly over the past two or three decades, both in response to the perceived need for a more careful shepherding of the renewable resource base upon which life itself depends, and also as a result of improvements in analytical and computational techniques. In this review I first describe two classical resource models, one designed for fisheries and the other for forestry. In subsequent sections I describe some of the major directions in which these models have been extended to become more realistic and more useful. I conclude with a call to resource modelers to extend their outlook to encompass global resource issues.