Optimal Exploitation of Renewable Resources under Uncertainty and the Extinction of Species

Under a minimal set of assumptions, the paper identifies conditions on the transition function of a Markov process leading to the following three scenarios: extinction, conservation, and the existence of a safe standard of conservation. These conditions are used to obtain restrictions on a framework of optimal exploitation of a renewable resource, under which the above three scenarios would occur. The biological growth function is allowed to be non-concave, and is subject to a random environmental shock, thereby making the results suitable for applications in a wide variety of models in renewable resource management.