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Adaptive Management of Ecosystems
Citation:
Allen, C. R., J. J. Fontaine, AND A. GARMESTANI. Adaptive Management of Ecosystems. Chapter 8, Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY, , 125-147, (2012).
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Adaptive management is an approach to natural resource management that emphasizes learning through management. As such, management may be treated as experiment, with replication, or management may be conducted in an iterative manner. Although the concept has resonated with many resource management scientists and practitioners, for years following its formal introduction in 1978 (Holling 1978) it remained little practiced and much misunderstood. Misunderstanding was largely based upon the belief that adaptive management is what management has always been doing. But, rather than a trial and error approach, adaptive management has explicit structure, including a careful elucidation of goals, design including the identification of alternative management objectives and hypotheses of causation, and collection of data followed by evaluation and reiteration. Since its initial introduction and description, adaptive management has been hailed as a solution to endless trial and error approaches to complex natural resource management challenges. However, it does not produce easy answers, and it is appropriate in only a subset of natural resource management problems. It is not a panacea for the navigation of ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1973, Ludwig, 2001).
