Adaptive Management of Natural Resources: Concepts and Applications

Our country’s natural resource challenges today are more complex and more difficult to resolve than ever before. The loss of biodiversity, changing climatic patterns, spread of invasive species, alteration of landscapes, and many other problems pose serious threats to the long-term sustainability of America’s natural resources. We urgently need to find new ways to address these problems. In particular, we need new methods and technologies to deal with the scale of the human footprint on the landscape, and new approaches to address the impacts of that footprint. A major challenge is to account for, and ultimately improve, our understanding of the long-term consequences of our actions. In this book, the authors use case studies to show how adaptive management can be used for both management and learning. The book focuses on practical applications in the areas of importance to Department of Interior managers climate change, water, energy, and human impacts on the landscape. Adaptive management is presented as a form of structured decision making, with an emphasis on the value of reducing uncertainty over time in order to improve management. The first half of the book covers the foundations and challenges of adaptive management, and the second half documents examples that illustrate the components of adaptive management.