Towards Adaptive Management

By Erica Goldman

Some of the services that ecosystems provide — clean drinking water, soil stabilization, fish, or recreation — can be assigned a value by people who use them, which can help scientists advise on how to restore them.

Ideas like stable states and thresholds may help us think about how ecosystems work, but translating theoretical precepts into practical management can be a tall order. For the Chesapeake, restoration aimed at recapturing at least some of the past is largely uncharted territory, one that will require management efforts that can be constantly tweaked and fine-tuned as they progress. And, while scientists can provide advice and insight into what a system might look like as it moves along a restoration trajectory, ultimately the decisions rest with those who use the Bay and live in the surrounding watershed to determine what ecological and economic services they want it to provide.

"The resilience framework resonates for a lot of people because it acknowledges that ecosystems are dynamic and change," says Barry Gold, a program officer for the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. But it will take a "different kind of ecological science — adaptive management" — to restore ecosystems based on these concepts, he says. "We won't have controls or replicates. We will go in with the current models and strong monitoring, implement restoration actions, and see how the system responds. The response will guide the next decisions," he says.

In theory, this back-and-forth management paradigm sounds logical, but in practice it has proved quite difficult to implement. In the Bay community, according to some, adaptive management has not yet taken root. "We have fallen into a cultural pathway of deterministic modeling," says University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science president Don Boesch. "No one can answer the question about how well observations match the predictions because we haven't focused on constantly checking the model with experiments and monitoring."

When funding is awarded for a restoration project, monitoring is the part most often cut, explains ecologist Margaret Palmer, from the University of Maryland, College Park, who is spearheading the National River Restoration Science Synthesis (NRRSS) — a project to develop a comprehensive national database to review and analyze the success of stream river restoration projects and to present information in a way useful to scientists, restoration practitioners and policy makers. "Our goal is to advance restoration in practice by tracking what has been done with their outcomes — we need an adaptive scheme that involves close monitoring to see what is working and how to improve the underlying science," she says.

In order to implement an adaptive management approach, according to Palmer, it is critical to involve a diverse group of managers, developers, environmental advocates and citizens in an iterative process. Scientists evaluate the environmental implications of meeting the stakeholder goals, go back to the stakeholders to decide if the environmental costs are too high, and then re-visit other options. "I am a firm believer that stakeholders should decide where a system should be restored to," she says. Once stakeholders agree about what they want, only then should science advise restoration efforts.

"It is a value decision," agrees ecologist Heather Leslie from Princeton University. "I don't think it is our role as scientists to dictate what is an acceptable state for an ecosystem." Leslie is working to develop a conceptual model for coastal marine ecosystems that is grounded in a resilience framework, linking local, regional and national institutions. She will test the model through a series of case studies, one of which will likely be the Chesapeake Bay.

Along similar lines, a growing group of scientists focus on "ecosystem services" as a way to frame the goal of restoration efforts. Some of the services that ecosystems provide, such as clean drinking water, soil stabilization by plants, fish, or recreation, can be assigned a value by people who use them, which can help scientists advise on how to restore them.

"It is more difficult to develop a restoration strategy if society cares both about a particular function and about individual species," says Palmer. In the case of the Bay, for example, if society decides that we care only about clean water, we could put in additional wetlands with non-native species that optimize this function. But the connection with Chesapeake's heritage places value on specific species, such as the native oyster and blue crab, she says.

"When the first [ecosystem services] work was published in 1994, it seemed utilitarian and cold-hearted," says ecologist Shahid Naeem at Columbia University in New York City. But like pistons and carburetors, assemblages of species in their environment do play a role in how the system operates, he says. "Biodiversity for its own sake is wonderful, don't get me wrong," he says. Still, the "aesthetic of biodiversity," will not move the science of restoration forward for ecosystems in which people are inextricably intertwined, he says.

The Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) of the Chesapeake Bay Program took an "ecosystem services" approach in its landmark report, Chesapeake Futures, published last year. Without assigning value to any of three possible scenarios that are developed, the report challenges its audience to envision the Chesapeake Bay in the year 2030 — charging the reader to make choices about what is important. Based on these choices, the report outlines science and management roadmaps for each vision of the future.

Ultimately, movement towards any of the futures that we choose requires scientific progress, political buy-in, and social investment. In many ways, the science of ecology is playing catch up with engineering and space science and we have only begun the Herculean effort to understand how ecosystems function as an integrated whole.

"I find it appalling that we know how to put a missile together, but not a salt marsh," says ecologist Andrew Dobson at Princeton University, who studies the ecology of infectious diseases.

But there has been progress on the political-social front. Just this summer, the Maryland legislature passed the "flush tax," which adds a $2.50 per month charge to each household to pay for sewage treatment plant improvements and directs the revenue to the newly created Chesapeake Restoration Fund. As the link between the investments people are willing to make to build a different future for the Bay grows stronger, the slope of the uphill trajectory towards restoration gets incrementally less steep.

This page was last modified November 03, 2004

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