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Adaptive management, urban systems, and ecosystem services
Citation:
Garmestani, A., D. Herrmann, D. Angeler, K. Schwarz, D. Twidwell, AND C. Allen. Adaptive management, urban systems, and ecosystem services. Ecololgical Society of America Annual Meeting, Louisville, KY, August 11 - 17, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This study advances understanding of how to improve environmental governance for linked social-ecological systems, which has critical ramifications for improving environmental outcomes. This paper moves the research on environmental governance forward by analyzing the issue, and providing guidance for moving forward. In the long-term, improving environmental governance has broad-scale implications for the environment in the United States, with particular interest for Regions, communities and the general public.
Description:
Social-ecological systems are characterized by scale specific structure, alternative regimes and high uncertainty. This confounds the management of social-ecological systems by implicitly forcing tradeoffs between multiple ecosystem services within and across scales. Adaptive management is a framework for managing social-ecological systems when uncertainty and controllability are both high. When undertaking management, it is important to account for spatial and temporal scale in order to minimize cross-scale effects of management actions. This is particularly true when managing for ecosystem services: The iterative nature of an adaptive approach may have the capacity to accommodate tradeoffs between different stakeholder priorities and multiple ecosystem services within and across scales. Thus, utilizing adaptive management (and governance) for provisioning of ecosystem services has potential for the management of social-ecological systems.