Adaptive Management

Adaptive Management is gaining in popularity and has become a popular buzzword in agency management proposals. Unfortunately, if you look in the published literature, you won't find that many examples of successful adaptive management projects. One of the hold-ups is that adaptive management tends to offer its results on a long time scale, which doesn't make for rapid publication. Long time scales also put adaptive management projects at risk of not being completed, as personnel changes, budget cuts, or simply the lack quick, positive results may result in stopping the project long before it has time to offer results.

Another hold-up is the fact that many people don't exactly understand what is involved in "adaptive management". Adaptive management is "learning by doing" at its simplest. It is also a means of managing in the face of uncertainty. When faced with management of a site, managers may find that they really do not know which management techniques will help them meet their site objectives. They could hold off on management until they have done research to test a variety of alternatives. This process is slow, however, and in many sites management will need to start doing something right away (e.g. degraded sites, sites with invasive species, sites with rare species). Adaptive management allows managers to start managing immediately and to develop their management as an experiment to test which alternative treatments work best.

As mentioned above, adaptive management turns management into an experiment. Ideally, it is a landscape-scale experimental test of different management alternatives. The steps I've developed are as follows:

• First, develop your management question. What is your main management question or largest area of uncertainty? What are your objectives?
• Second, synthesize information relevant to managing your site. Survey the on-site management staff to find out what management techniques have been used in the past, what have worked, and what have not worked. Synthesize information about management of similar sites. Make a list of potential management techniques that might be useful to test, and narrow it down to those techniques that are feasible at your management scale.
• Third, develop a preliminary adaptive management plan. Decide on a few alternative techniques to test. Decide on your scale, how many experimental units are available to use, and come up with the best experimental design possible. Ideally, experimental design principles such as randomization and replication of treatments and use of control plots should be included. This ideal is not always possible in the field, but try to design the best experiment that you can.
• Fourth, meet with the stakeholders. Develop a list of all those individuals or groups who will be impacted by your management or who have some stake in how you manage. This is your opportunity to present the adaptive management plan to these groups and gain support for it. Express a strong interest in getting their comments and suggestions for the project, as well as their concerns. Involve them in the process.
• Fifth, adjust the adaptive management project to help minimize these concerns and incorporate these suggestions. There is a risk in compromise in that you may be pressured to modify treatments until they are not as effective. There may also be pressure to assign any controversial treatments to less sensitive areas. Thus, this process may reduce the effectiveness of your adaptive management experiment. However, incorporating different viewpoints might offer new and useful suggestions, and involving the stakeholders in the process removes the risk of having the entire experiment shut down by political pressures.
• Sixth, implement the updated adaptive management experiment. Allow it to run at least long enough for the treatments to have time to take effect.
• Seventh, collect the data and analyze it. Earlier in the process you should have selected a few measurements to make in the site that will best tell you whether the site is responding to treatment and whether your objectives are being reached. Collect it in an unbiased manner and analyze it.
• Eighth, feed the results of the data analysis back into your management plan. Determine which treatments are having a positive effect and which are not. Steps six through eight should be continued until all feasible alternative treatments have been evaluated and until management is comfortable knowing which management alternatives are most effective under a variety of conditions.
• Finally, add complexity. Once management is comfortable with a simple design including a few alternatives, test more alternatives. You can also find new management questions to test. You can model the system and find areas of uncertainty that you were not aware of to ask additional questions. Natural systems change and adaptive management should continue indefinitely, with each iteration giving you more information about your system, which treatments it responds best to, how these responses vary in wet or dry years, etc.

Reading Suggestions

Key Readings

Gunderson, L. H., C. S. Holling, and S. S. Light. 1995. Barriers and bridges to the renewal of ecosystems and institutions. Columbia University Press, New York.

Holling, C. S. 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. John Wiley and Sons, London.

Lee, K. N. 1993. Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Sit, V. and B. Taylor. 1998. Statistical Methods for Adaptive Management Studies. Research Branch, B. C. Ministry of Forests, Research Branch, Victoria, BC, Land Management Handbook No. 42.

Taylor, B., L. Kremsater, and R. Ellis. 1997. Adaptive management of forests in British Columbia. British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Forest Practices Branch, Victoria, BC, Canada.

Walters, C. J. 1986. Adaptive management of renewable resources. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, New York.

Other Helpful References

Bormann, B. T., P. G. Cunningham, M. H. Brookes, V. W. Manning, and M. W. Collopy. 1994. Adaptive Ecosystem Management in the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Northwest Research Station, General Technical Report PNW-GTR-341, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Graham, A. C. and L. E. Kruger. 2002. Research in adaptive management: working relations and the research process. Pacific Northwest Research Station, Research Paper PNW-RP-538, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Halbert, C. L. 1993. How adaptive is adaptive management? Implementing adaptive management in Washington state and British Columbia. Reviews in Fisheries Science 1:261-283.

Lee, K. N. 1999. Appraising adaptive management. Conservation Ecology 3(2):3 [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol3/iss2/art3.

Stankey, G. H. 2003. Adaptive management at the regional scale: breakthrough innovation or mission impossible? A report on an American experience. Pp 159-177 in: B. P. Wilson and A. Curtis, editors. Agriculture for the Australian Environment: Proceedings of the 2002 Fenner Conference on the Environment. Johnstone Center, Charles Stuart University, Alsbury, NSW, Australia.

Stankey, G. H., B. T. Bormann, C. Ryan, B. Shindler, V. Sturtevant, R. N. Clark, and C. Philpot. 2003. Adaptive management and the Northwest Forest Plan: rhetoric and reality. Journal of Forestry 101:40-46.

Volkman, J. M. and W. E. McConnaha. 1993. Through a glass, darkly: Columbia River salmon, the Endangered Species Act, and adaptive management. Environmental Law 23:1249-1272.

Walters, C. 1997. Challenges in adaptive management of riparian and coastal ecosystems. Conservation Ecology 1(2):1 [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol1/iss2/art1.

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