Adaptive Management of National Park Ecosystems

ecosystems is challenging because park managers cannot accurately determine ecosystem states and predict the outcomes of management actions due to uncertainty. Four sources of uncertainty arise. First, variability in social, demographic, ecological, and economic factors makes it difficult to infer the state of an ecosystem from observed conditions and predict ecosystem responses to management actions in advance of their implementation. Second, sampling and measurement errors make it difficult to precisely measure ecosystem conditions. Third, incomplete knowledge of ecosystems prevents accurate assessment of ecosystem states. Fourth, there is often disagreement or uncertainty about the attributes of desirable ecosystem states (Peterman and Peters 1998; Conroy 2000). Adaptive management (AM) provides an appropriate framework for managing ecosystems subject to multiple sources of uncertainty (Prato 2000, 2003, 2005). Specifically, AM: (1) increases the rate at which policy makers and resource managers acquire knowledge about ecological relationships; (2) aids management decisions through the use of iterative hypothesis-testing; (3) enhances information flows among policy makers; and (4) creates shared understandings among scientists, policy-makers, and managers (Peterman 1977; Holling 1978; Clark et al. 1979; McLain and Lee 1996; Wondolleck and Yaffe 2000). This article proposes an AM framework for national park ecosystems. The next section presents an overview of AM. The third section discusses the use of AM