Adaptive Management as a Way to Learn.

The authors review "tradition," "trial and error," and "scientific experiment" as learning modes. All have positive aspects, but are also lacking in the face of the complexities of modern resource management. Tradition is stuck in inflexible paradigms and training; trial and error tends to yield individualistic learning and suggests hit and miss approaches that don’t play well in bureaucratic and public arena; and scientific experimentation, while serving society well for hundreds of years, tends to be reductionist and to offer narrow limited insights.

Then they propose a combination of trial and error and scientific experiment: "Active Adaptive Management."

The goal is to get learning from management: it will be both relevant (it comes from actual management situations) and valid (it is tested, and monitored, and assessed against scientific criteria).

They illustrate this in Figure 4.2.

• Begins with brainstorming of imaginative policy options.

• Explicit modeling of the system and how it might respond to the new management
• This includes identifying gaps in knowledge

• Design of management options, and a management experiment (that is, setting aside areas or populations for no-treatment as a case/control)

• Measurer and assess performance

• Choose a policy

The Glen Canyon Dam case is informative especially for the ways that it departs from adaptive management---be sure to get this.

Idaho elk management seems like an adaptive management success story. Note their key missing information: whether hunting antlerless elk is additive or compensatory mortality. Also note that they had to allow some very limited hunting in the control area for "public relations purposes." It is a rare case where managers have the convenience of designing full-on experiments.

The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP)

There is a lot more to this case than the text can describe, for this is part of the (in)famous spotted owl controversy, as alluded to. The neat part is that the plan was designed with adaptive management/learning. Read Box 4.2. The authors call it passive because true experiments are not allowed by the many laws and regulations under which the plan was formulated and implemented (this seems to me to make Glen Canyon a passive plan, too). But the NWFP does reflect a lot more flexibility than standard forest plans. Critics even complained in court that "ecosystems management" violated the MU/SY Act, the National Forest Management Act, FACA, and other laws. The judge said that the agencies could proactive EM.

The North American Waterfowl Plan

The key adaptive element here is the continuing assessment on the landscape ecology if waterfowl refuges: a team is trying to assess from harvest data over the years whether to lean toward more, smaller units or fewer, larger units. The authors may be stretching this to call it adaptive EM, but they’re desperate for cases and admit in this chapter that explicit cases are rare.