Monitoring

• Acknowledgement of uncertainty about what treatment (or no treatment) is "best" for the particular management issue
• Thoughtful selection of the treatments to be applied (the assessment and design stages of the cycle)
• Careful implementation of a treatment designed to reveal the critical knowledge that is currently lacking
• Monitoring of key response indicators
• Analysis of the treatment outcomes in consideration of the original objectives
• Incorporation of the results into treatment decision

The Government Accountability Office evaluated the adaptive management process for emergency stabilization and burned area rehabilitation and found:

• Most burned land recovered naturally; however, in those relatively few instances where burnt lands threaten safety, ecosystems, or cultural resources, emergency stabilization and rehabilitation treatments can play a critical role—a role that is emphasized by the appropriations Congress has dedicated to post wildfire treatments.
• The treatments use to protect and restore burnt lands appear, on the face of it, to be reasonable. For the most part, however, bureaus are approving treatment plans without comprehensive information on the extent to which a treatment is likely to be effective given the severity of the wildfire, the weather, soil, and terrain.
• Studies have been done that recognize the need for information on treatment effectiveness, but they have not emphasized the importance of collecting, storing, analyzing, and disseminating such data.

And recommended that the Secretaries of Agriculture and of the Interior require the heads of their respective land management agencies to:

• Specify procedures to be used to monitor treatment effectiveness, include type and extent of monitoring data collected and methods to collect these data
• Develop an interagency system to collect, store, and disseminate information on monitoring results.

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