The language of the cutting–edge decision–making process known as “adaptive resource management” is confusing. Many terms involved—“16x16 transition matrices,” “utility functions,” “iterative phase” and “Bayes Theorem”—can be downright intimidating to the uninitiated.
But adaptive resource management is increasingly popular as a framework for projects on national wildlife refuges and elsewhere, so it’s probably high time to let Sara Vacek demystify the concept.
Vacek—a wildlife biologist at Morris Wetland Management District in Minnesota for her entire 10–year U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service career—echoes what an instructor once told her: Adaptive resource management is “learning through management and adjusting management action based on what you learn.”
Imagine a continuum, Vacek says. On one end is trial–and–error problem–solving. On the other end is scientific research in which the whole point is simply to learn. “Adaptive resource management is right in the middle between those two,” she says. “It’s a way to combine science and management effectively.”
Vacek, several other Service staff members and U.S. Geological Survey scientists are utilizing the technique on a massive native prairie management project. The conservation effort, which involves 20 Refuge System field stations and 120 management units in the Prairie Pothole Region, is aimed at controlling two invasive grasses—smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass—using various forms of disturbance, including prescribed fire, grazing and haying.
Vacek and Service employees Kim Bousquet, Pauline Drobney, Vanessa Fields, Bridgette Flanders–Wanner and Todd Grant displayed a science poster about the project at last summer’s Conserving the Future conference. The poster’s title is a mouthful—“An Adaptive Approach to Invasive Plant Management on Fish and Wildlife Service–Owned Native Prairies in the Northern Great Plains: Decision Support Under Uncertainty.”
Its content is a bit technical. However, it gets to the essence of adaptive resource management—which is to use probability models to forecast outcomes of various conservation options.
The adaptive management framework requires a conservationist to make a systematic prediction of what’s likely to happen before acting. It also requires conservationists to periodically reexamine and revisit decisions within an established time frame.
The adaptive management pattern is: action, monitor, model … possibly new action, re–monitor, re–model … repeat. The result, says Vacek, is more certainty than with traditional trial and error.
“The thinking is that the less blind flaying around that you do, the more efficient you’ll be,” says Vacek, who appreciates the Prairie Pothole invasive grasses project’s adaptive management approach. “I hope I’m not biased, but I feel that this is the first one where we’re kind of getting it right.”
USGS scientists and Service biologists in the field have been working together from the start, and communication among them has been an ongoing conversation rather than periodic one–way communication. In addition, Vacek says, adaptive management is “a good way to be more transparent—transparent to my boss, to his boss and to the American public.”
Adaptive management can be challenging, she acknowledges, “but mostly because it’s a new way of thinking that we’re not used to.”
At the moment, there is another minus from the Service perspective: a dearth of statistics–savvy personnel capable of building probability models. The invasive grasses project model, for instance, was developed by the USGS.
Still, Vacek sees adaptive resource management as a wave of the future because it merges science and management to the benefit of both.
“I always hear a lot of talk about refuge managers making science–based decisions,” she says, “but this actually is incorporating science into our decisions.”
To see a depiction of the Prairie Pothole Region invasive grasses project, go to http://AmericasWildlife.org/conference/science and look for poster No. 16.
