Ecosystems, Adaptive Management - Ecological Systems - page 127

experiments meant to reduce uncertainty. Both scientists sought an approach that
allowed resource management and exploitation to continue while explicitly
embracing uncertainties and seeking to reduce them through management. Walters
[ 1 ] described the process of adaptive management as beginning “with the central
tenet that management involves a continual learning process that cannot conve-
niently be separated into functions like research and ongoing regulatory activities,
and probably never converges to a state of blissful equilibrium involving full
knowledge and optimum productivity.” He characterized adaptive management as
the process of defining and bounding the management problem, identifying and
representing what is known through models of dynamics that identify assumptions
and predictions so experience can further learning, identifying possible sources of
uncertainty and identifying alternate hypotheses, and finally the design of policies
to allow continued resource management or production while enhancing learning.
A key focus of adaptive management is the identification and reduction, where
possible, of uncertainty. Uncertainty is reduced through management experiments
which enhance learning. Williams [ 6 ] describes four critical sources of uncertainty:
1. Environmental variation is often the most common source of uncertainty, and is
largely uncontrollable. It may have a dominating influence on natural resource
systems, through such factors as random variability in climate.
2. Partial observability refers to uncertainty about resource status. An example of
this is the sampling variation that arises in resource monitoring.
3. Partial controllability arises when indirect means (e.g., regulations) are used to
implement an action (e.g., setting a harvest rate), and it can lead to the misrep-
resentation of management interventions and thus to an inadequate accounting
of their influence on resource behavior.
4. Structural or process uncertainty arises from a lack of understanding or agree-
ment regarding the structure of biological and ecological relationships that drive
resource dynamics.
Adaptive Management Today
Adaptive management has been referenced either implicitly [ 11 ] or explicitly
[ 2 , 13 ] for more than 50 years, but despite an illustrious theoretical history, there
has remained imperfect realization of adaptive management in real world natural
resource management decisions. The limited implementation of adaptive manage-
ment stems from three fundamental problems: (1) a lack of clarity in definition and
approach, (2) a paucity of success stories upon which to build [ 14 - 18 ], and
(3) management, policy, and funding paradigms that favor reactive rather than
proactive approaches to natural resource management [ 19 , 20 ]. Each of these
challenges has slowed the development of adaptive management as a paradigm
for natural resource management and resulted in incomplete, inefficient, and even
inappropriate implementation of adaptive management.