Ecosystem Management: Adaptive, Community-Based Conservation

By Gary Meffe, Larry Nielsen, Richard L. Knight and Dennis Schenborn

Today's natural resource managers must be able to navigate among the complicated interactions and conflicting interests of diverse stakeholders and decisionmakers. Technical and scientific knowledge, though necessary, are not sufficient. Science is merely one component in a multifaceted world of decision making. And while the demands of resource management have changed greatly, natural resource education and textbooks have not. Until now.

Ecosystem Management represents a different kind of textbook for a different kind of course. It offers a new and exciting approach that engages students in active problem solving by using detailed landscape scenarios that reflect the complex issues and conflicting interests that face today's resource managers and scientists. Focusing on the application of the sciences of ecology and conservation biology to real-world concerns, it emphasizes the intricate ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional matrix in which natural resource management functions, and illustrates how to be more effective in that challenging arena.

Each chapter is rich with exercises to help facilitate problem-based learning. The main text is supplemented by boxes and figures that provide examples, perspectives, definitions, summaries, and learning tools, along with a variety of essays written by practitioners with on-the-ground experience in applying the principles of ecosystem management.

Accompanying the textbook is an instructor's manual that provides a detailed overview of the book and specific guidance on designing a course around it.

Ecosystem Management grew out of a training course developed and presented by the authors for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at its National Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In 20 offerings to more than 600 natural resource professionals, the authors learned a great deal about what is needed to function successfully as a professional resource manager. The book offers important insights and a unique perspective dervied from that invaluable experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597267892

Book preview

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Introduction: New Approaches for a New Millennium

HUMAN ACTIVITY OVER THE PAST SEVERAL HUNDRED years has left a significant and growing footprint on planet Earth. In no period of human history has our species had a greater impact on the biophysical world. Ozone holes at the poles and microcontaminants in virtually every living organism attest to the far-reaching effects of human activities on every ecosystem. We build roads and log the hot zone of equatorial Africa and then carry emergent viruses across oceans. We burn neotropical rain forests to make way for grazing and farming on land that can sustain those practices for only a few short years. We mine ancient aquifers to make the deserts bloom, while other land-use practices expand the deserts of North Africa. We dam rivers for irrigation that wither the Caspian and Aral Seas. We harvest the world's oceans until the catch is depleted and then move on to a new place or to another trophic level. We develop and use land with only the barest knowledge of the consequences of our actions on the complex food webs and the bioenergetics of oceanic and terrestrial systems too vast to understand, yet so vulnerable that we have altered them in irrevocable ways.

In the United States, we reduce timber harvest on our public forests, while we increase our consumption of wood products and decry the cutting of boreal and tropical forests. We build cities in the desert and let them sprawl with far-flung subdivisions, while we ponder the politics and technology necessary to move water from the Great Lakes to the Southwest. We construct subdivisions over rich mesic farmlands of the Midwest, while building elaborate irrigation systems to grow crops in green circles on arid, short-grass prairie. We let chance plan our cities while we meticulously bioengineer transgenic crops and other species to solve problems we have created but do not understand. We cannot, however, effectively engineer what we do not understand, and what we largely do not understand is our impact on the ecosystems upon which we depend.

During the twentieth century, we became detached from the land that supports us and often lost sight of its complexity. Although it is crucial that we consider the long-term consequences of our actions on the ecological systems that support life on Earth, we typically fail to do so. Now, as we measure ozone holes at the poles, shrinking ice caps, rising seas, and the lack of fresh water, a growing knowledge about the impact of humans on the environment compels changes in our business-as-usual attitude. We are more than 6 billion people who have crossed into a new millennium, and we have a clear choice: to continue our destructive relationship with the ecological world or to diverge from the path taken for the last several hundred years.

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This book is about the application of the sciences of ecology and conservation biology to real-world problem solving. Emphasizing the complex ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional matrix in which natural resource management functions, it will illustrate how we can be more effective in that challenging arena. This book is also about people in communities of interest and communities of place— people who care so much about their quality of life today and in the future that they have chosen to work with others to improve the places where they live, work, and play, while restoring the land. It is about the interface of science, people, and their governments as they struggle to understand their collective impacts on ecosystems and change their approaches. It is about people who believe that, because their actions affect ecosystems in profound ways, they must learn to live more gently on the land. Here are a few examples (Figure 1.1):

• In south Florida, a coalition of public agencies, environmental groups, and private citizens are restoring and protecting critical habitat for the Florida panther and many other species on a million acres of private land.

• A group of ecological and social scientists in China is trying to influence their government's population control, emigration, and economic policies to better balance the needs of the local human community with the habitat needs of the last giant pandas living in the wild.

• Amidst large pressures from development interests, nearly 1 million acres of native Arizona and New Mexican grasslands and forests are cooperatively managed by the Malpai Borderlands Group to maintain ranching lifestyles and restore the natural processes that sustain a healthy, unfragmented landscape.

• Along the Blackfoot River of Montana, ranchers and other private landowners are working together to restore the river while maintaining the rural working character of the landscape. They have restored 100 miles of the river, recreated 2100 acres of wetlands, and placed 45,000 acres in conservation easements.

• More than 135 private and public organizations have created the Chicago Wilderness initiative to protect, restore, and manage native prairie, wetlands, and other natural communities in and around the city of Chicago. Their mission includes community outreach and education efforts.

• In the Applegate Valley of Oregon, environmentalists, loggers, and government officials set aside their differences and found a common ground centered on managing for a healthy forest with natural and economic values.

These and many other examples of community-based approaches to ecosystem management affirm that we can, as Aldo Leopold wrote in 1938, learn to live on a piece of land without spoiling it. The people who are making progress toward resolving natural resource issues at the ecosystem level do so by avoiding prolonged court battles and win-lose situations. Success comes from rational discussion among groups with different viewpoints and the development of common goals. Sharing scientific information is, of course, essential to mutual understanding of the natural processes affected by human activity, but it is not, by itself, enough. The success stories come not only from understanding scientific information, but also from the motivations of various people and their ways of facilitating dialog and consensus to reach common goals.

The Appearance of Ecosystem Management

In the 1990s, natural resource management in the United States underwent a major change in philosophy and direction. As past efforts using topdown, government-mandated, expert-driven approaches to managing natural resources failed or met with public resistance and resentment, new ideas came into play that took a different approach. For the first time in conservation history, shared decision making, cooperation rather than confrontation, and grass-roots, community-based involvement at the local level began to replace or supplement government-mandated programs imposed on landscapes from the outside. These efforts are also focusing on large natural systems (such as watersheds), rather than staying within artificial and ecologically meaningless straight lines on a map. Known variously as ecosystem management, community-based conservation, adaptive management, or landscape-level conservation, these efforts are not only working, but are sweeping through natural resource management agencies, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and even industry as a more reasonable way to conduct land and resource management. There is no going back at this point, and as we move further into the twenty-first century with an expanding human population and shrinking resource base, the demand for ecosystem management as an appropriate problem-solving mechanism will only increase.

This book is intended to address this change in approach and to prepare you—today's students of natural resource management and conservation—for the many challenges that await you as professionals. The book is based on three fundamental premises:

1. The effective and efficient use and management of Earth's natural resources are critically important to both human welfare and the continuance of functional ecosystems and biological diversity on this planet.

2. The management of such use is an increasingly difficult challenge, as each year witnesses more people chasing fewer resources in a more contentious way.

3. Traditional university curricula may not fully prepare students in natural resource management programs for grappling with the extraordinarily complex, uncertain, multidimensional, and often contentious arena in which these challenges are played out.

Our intention is to directly address the third premise: enabling you as students to more effectively deal with the second premise when you become professionals, so that the first premise can ultimately be achieved. But first we must ask whether these premises are true, or at least reasonable approximations. Let's examine them in turn.

First premise. Obviously, all of the resources humanity uses come from Earth, driven by the energy source of the sun. So in a trivial sense, at least, the first premise is true: We only have materials from Earth with which to prosper as a species. But in a less trivial vein, scientific evidence continues to show that functional ecosystems provide humanity with many and diverse services that we could not live without: oxygen production, purification of fresh water, erosion control, fertile soil production and retention, climate control and temperature amelioriation, food production, crop pollination, waste decomposition and detoxification, mitigation of floods and droughts, and so forth. And biologically diverse systems seem better than impoverished systems at providing these services. The loss of such functions cannot help but be harmful to humanity. At minimum, they are prohibitively costly to replace through technological means, and they obviously are harmful to the diversity of life on Earth.

Second premise. Our experiences and those of other scientists and managers unequivocally indicate that natural resource management increasingly faces complex challenges. Special interests, ideologically driven politics, competition for limited space and resources by a growing human population, and an increasing disconnection from the land by Americans and others have combined to exploit natural systems in a degradative and unsustainable manner and offer challenging management dilemmas.

Third premise. A trend in the second half of the twentieth century toward specialization and highly focused, disciplinary training in university curricula means that you may be ill-prepared to meet the challenges of a complex, contentious atmosphere that requires skills well beyond technical, scientific knowledge. We have repeatedly heard from natural resource professionals that their university training did not come close to preparing them for the non-scientific aspects of their jobs—the people parts of their work that often dominate their days. To better prepare you as professionals, we wish to introduce you to such a world in a safe setting where scenarios may be played out, experience gained, and new skills developed.

This book is intended to actively engage you in problem solving by melding the scientific principles of conservation biology with the complex human dimensions that prevail in everyday life, with the goal of equipping you to address real issues in conservation and management. This problem-solving, inquiry-based mode of learning is, we think, more effective for professional development than the traditional lecture-and-listen mode, because conservation and resource management are dynamic activities that require active, engaged people able to adapt to changing circumstances. It is also vastly more exciting, as it enables you to grapple with problems and develop your own solutions through direct experience and participation, and apply your technical knowledge to real issues. Thus, this book and its accompanying course will likely be different from traditional classes you have had and books you have used. We note in particular that this is not a comprehensive textbook in conservation biology; there are other books that serve that purpose. Rather, we use basic principles of conservation biology, integrated with practical aspects of the human dimensions, to pursue and forge problem solving for real landscapes.

How to Use This Book

This book is structured around three main parts. Part I (Chapters 1–4) provides the conceptual tool-box of, and sets the stage for, ecosystem management. These chapters present the basic models and concepts that will be followed throughout. Part II (Chapters 5–9) provides the biological and ecological background necessary to conduct effective ecosystem management by discussing levels of biological organization from genes progressively up through landscapes. This will be a review for many, and new material for others, and will get everyone on the same playing field. Part III (Chapters 10–12) uses the various human dimensions to implement the technical, ecological knowledge that you have within contemporary socioeconomic and institutional settings.

In Chapters 2–12, problem-solving exercises directly engage you with the material at hand. These exercises are perhaps the most critical aspect of this approach, as they will challenge you to use the materials in an applied, hands-on manner and often will give you the opportunity to discuss the materials (sometimes in a heated fashion!) with your fellow students. In places, the material is also complemented with boxes, or supplementary material having some bearing on the subject at hand. These should also enrich your experiences and stimulate further thinking on the topic.

There are eight essays—Experiences in Ecosystem Management—presented at the end of selected chapters. These are firsthand accounts of ecosystem management and community-based conservation, written by the people who were there and are trying to make this approach work on the ground in real places. Although the essays do not necessarily correspond to the specific contents of the chapters, they are good examples of the challenges that are occuring in many places of finding innovative ways to reduce conflict and live better upon the land. You should use these essays as guides to applying this approach to real-world situations. Each essay ends with several questions that offer fodder for further discussion on that particular ecosystem experience. These will prove very useful, as they derive from real situations that professionals have had to grapple with.

What really sets this course apart from others, and, we think, makes it quite exciting, is that it is built around hypothetical but realistic and complex landscape scenarios that you will work with to make decisions and recommendations in an ecosystem management framework. Three scenarios are included in Chapter 1: one represents the northeastern or midwestern part of the United States (The ROLE Model); a second represents the intermountain west (SnowPACT); and a third reflects the humid, lowland southeast (PDQ Revival). Individually and as a class you will become intimately familiar with one or more of these scenarios, including their geographic settings; ecological features (such as major habitat types, prevalent species, hydrology, climate, and management issues); and the human landscape, including the socioeconomic features, political scene, and major players. The scenarios will be used throughout the course to address natural resource management problems and issues that represent those likely to arise in such settings. We recommend that you address most of these problems and issues as interactive groups or an entire class and seek solutions collectively via discussion and careful planning.

The problems and issues you will face are intentionally complex, sloppy, difficult—and maybe even frustrating at times. But they are realistic and reflect the problems that professionals in this field face nearly every day. The goal is to come to grips with the realities of the world so that you may be more competent as a professional to confront such challenges when it really counts.

You will find that often there is no one correct solution—or many possible solutions—for a given problem. And you will not know whether the responses you develop will actually work. There are no patently right or wrong answers to most exercises, and no answer guide is provided to check your results. This approach reflects how the world actually operates; you must learn to deal with vagueness and uncertainty, and make decisions with incomplete information and conflicting pressures. You also must learn to work with people outside your profession who represent different value systems, hold perspectives that may be unfamiliar to you, and have the power to do things that you cannot do or cannot stop. The approach we lay out here will provide an important opportunity to experience a realistic professional setting before you find yourself in such a situation where you eventually work—when it really counts, and when the future of the natural and human communities may be at stake.

Have fun with the scenarios! Embrace them—learn the players, begin to inhabit the places. Feel free to think outside the box to develop innovative solutions to very complex problems. Use this as an opportunity to apply what you already know about science and human behavior, combined with new materials and skills you will need to learn and develop, to address very practical and applied issues. Do not feel bound by convention, though you will be bound by laws and community standards of behavior. Always remember to act with integrity, conviction, and attention to detail. Regardless of your personal feelings about an issue, they should not cloud your objectivity as a scientist or your ethical obligations as a citizen. You may find yourself making recommendations you are uncomfortable with or would prefer not to do. This again reflects the challenges that professionals must deal with every day.

The scenarios, and the book as a whole, focus on the United States. We do this for two reasons: (1) Our collective experiences are in the U.S., and it is best to write what you know about; and (2) many of the ideas and approaches used here have been developed by and used in resource management in the U.S. Regardless, this approach and the ideas behind it fundamentally are without political boundaries. The scenarios are useful anywhere, or they can be modified to fit the special needs of any locality.

AN OVERVIEW AND THE FLOW OF THE TEXT

Our approach will be practical, will orient you toward active problem solving, and will center on realistic land management problems and issues. Chapter 1 provides the landscape scenarios that you will use to address management problems throughout the remainder of the book. Of course, this chapter should be read first (perhaps more than once) and the scenario information carefully absorbed. Chapter 2 formally defines ecosystem management and examines how successful action at an ecosystem scale requires the involvement and long-term commitment of ecological and social scientists, human communities, and government. Although they can produce short-term results, single-species oriented and unilateral, top-down approaches to managing natural resources often fail when applied to larger-scale systems or over longer time frames. Chapter 3 considers why uncertainty and variation dominate natural and human systems, pointing out how simple solutions focusing on only one or a few parameters do not take into account the complexity of most ecosystems. In Chapter 4, we see that natural resource policies and actions can be viewed as experiments that provide opportunities to learn about ecosystems, rather than prescriptions to be faithfully followed. The inherent complexity and uncertainty of ecosystems mandate the monitoring and evaluation of management actions, and modifications of our adaptive management approach as needed.

Chapters 5–9 present advances in the fields of genetics, population ecology, and landscape ecology that have given us new concepts and scientific tools with which to better understand ecosystems. These chapters collectively form a primer of conservation biology. They may be a review for some students and new material for others; regardless, they will lay the foundation for bringing science onto a firm footing with socioeconomic and institutional considerations in good management.

In Chapter 10, we discuss why natural resources cannot be managed effectively without public support. Court battles over ecosystem or environmental issues have not solved ecological problems. Lawsuits are time-consuming and expensive, and they produce losers as well as winners. Dialog between scientists and public interest groups can result in mutual goals that meet both ecological and human needs. People protect what they learn to value and fail to protect what they do not know how to value. Clearly, natural resources cannot be managed effectively without the application of objective, science-based ecological understanding, yet they also cannot be managed successfully without public support.

The scale of ecosystem management necessitates cooperation across multiple government jurisdictions and on both public and private lands. Piecemeal actions do not work as well as coordinated actions that focus on common objectives. A systematic and explicit process is essential to sustaining action and evaluating progress. Chapters 11 and 12 are concerned with the process of strategic thinking: deciding what the objectives should be, how to achieve them, and how to measure success.

You may notice that, contrary to many scientific textbooks, we generally do not include source citations for information within the text (other than to attribute direct quotes or ideas). Rather than break up the message with reference support for every point made, we conclude each chapter with appropriate references and suggested readings on that topic. We encourage you to pursue these writings as authoritative sources for the topics; they will provide more specialized information on each topic than we can offer here. Also, we move back and forth between metric and nonmetric measurements. Virtually all scientific work is done using metric units (meters, hectares, and so forth), but much conversation in the real world uses nonmetric measures (yards, acres, and so on). We retained both of these approaches to reflect the complexities of the world and to illustrate the flexibility needed by professionals to work within both scientific and nonscientific circles. Finally, note that terms in bold-face are important enough to be formally defined in a glossary toward the back of the book.

P A R T   I

The Conceptual Toolbox

CHAPTER 1

The Landscape Scenarios

YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH THIS BOOK AND THE SUCCESS of this course largely will revolve around and depend upon the landscape scenarios. These are where you will work on many of the problems and questions embedded in the chapters, to help you work through and experience the materials presented. Get to know your scenario thoroughly in every aspect: ecologically, socioeconomically, politically, and geographically.

Three landscape scenarios follow. All of them are equally challenging, and they all address the same basic problems.

• The ROLE Model is set in a midwestern/ northeastern landscape of mixed industrial and agricultural land use.

• SnowPACT is set in the intermountain West, with large private and public ownerships and associated conflicts of changing uses.

• PDQ Revival is set in the humid Southeast, is influenced by a major military base, and captures the changing sociopolitical climate of that region.

Your instructor will inform you which scenario(s) to use. As you read the assigned scenario, begin to digest its richness and complexities. Study the maps, look at the photographs, and get a good feel for the landscape. Begin to inhabit the place and become part it. You will refer to the scenario throughout the course and use it as a reference source for detailed information. In the chapters that follow, you will use your growing scientific knowledge base, combined with processes and techniques we will cover, to address and explore many challenging questions and issues to be addressed in this place. Dive in and have fun!

Note that each scenario contains names of individuals who play various roles in those systems. All names are fictitious, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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THE ROLE MODEL

Just 6 months ago, an unprecedented event occurred in the area known as Round Lake (Figure 1.1). Representatives of communities, agencies, and interest groups stood together before a press conference and read the following statement:

An old adage says, Today is the first day of the rest of your life. We can paraphrase by saying today is the first day of the rest of the Round Lake Ecosystem's life. We are here today to sign an agreement that dedicates the people, agencies, and resources of our area to a new style of managing our natural resources and environment. We pledge to work together to assure that the qualities we love and need—clean water, clean air, abundant and diverse wildlife and fish, healthy land, and productive farms and forests—will continue and prosper through time and space.

We have chosen to call this initiative the Round Lake Ecosystem Model—or ROLE Model—because we believe this effort can truly be a model for ourselves and the rest of the nation. We know that the ways of the past, which have fragmented land and communities and have pitted neighbor against neighbor, cannot continue. We all have too much to lose by those behaviors. And we have so much to gain by working together, using reason, and seeking win-win solutions to issues.

We often talk about being role models. We know that our children will behave as they see us behave, so we try to be honest, just, and forgiving within our families. We know that as responsible members of the public community, we must establish rules and procedures that are fair, open, and respectful of others. To these roles and role models, today we add the necessity of treating the land and its resources with the same care and respect that we extend to other humans. We recognize that we depend on the health and productivity of our lands to provide us the essentials of life—air, water, soil, plants, and animals— and also the beauty and comfort that nurtures our character.

Today we begin a long, difficult, and expensive journey, but a journey that we know will take us where we want to go. We are confident the people of the Round Lake ecosystem want to take this journey. We are proud that our citizens, businesses, agencies, and community groups are leading themselves and the nation in becoming the ROLE Model!

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THE ROLE MODEL AGREEMENT

The Round Lake Ecosystem Model Agreement is a simple document with profound implications. Most importantly, it establishes the Round Lake Ecosystem Team as a broadly based coalition of representatives of all groups that wish to join. It has an initial 10-year charter, with the expectation that it will be renewed continuously and become a leading focus for community planning and action.

The state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), through its secretary, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, through its regional director, have committed their resources to provide the base operations for the team. Each agency has agreed to assign one professional to coordinate the team's work for the next 5 years—commitments that were considered essential (and inspirational). In addition, each agency has agreed to assign its most senior local staff person to serve on the team. These are the DNR's District Director, Margaret Staples, and the Bingham National Wildlife Refuge manager, Oliver Adams. And, of course, these agencies have pledged the support of their staff and physical resources to help along the way.

All signatories to the agreement are automatically members of the team, and a subset has been elected by the members to comprise the Steering Committee. The list is impressive (Steering Committee members are noted by an asterisk):

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ROLE Model Members

Benson City Council*

Bingham National Wildlife Refuge*

Crawford County Planning Commission*

Cranberry Growers' Association*

Cranberry Marsh Audubon Society

Crawford County Grange*

Department of Natural Resources*

Friends of Round Lake

Hardwood Lumber Manufacturers' Association

Hunters for Waterfowl*

Lake City