A Bird in Our Hand: Weighing Uncertainty about the Past against Uncertainty about the Future in Channel Islands National Park

Introduction Climate change threatens many species and ecosystems. It also challenges managers of protected areas to adapt traditional approaches for setting conservation goals, and the philosophical and policy framework they use to guide management decisions (Cole and Yung 2010). A growing literature discusses methods for structuring management decisions in the face of climate-related uncertainty and risk (e.g., Polasky et al. 2011). It is often unclear, however, when managers should undertake such explicit decision-making processes. Given that not making a decision is actually a decision with potentially important implications, what should trigger management decision-making when threats are foreseeable but not yet manifest? Conservation planning for the island scrub-jay (Aphelocoma insularis) may warrant a near-term decision about non-traditional management interventions, and so presents a rare, specific case study in how managers assess uncertainty, risk, and urgency in the context of climate change. The jay is restricted to Santa Cruz Island, one of the five islands within Channel Islands National Park (CINP) off the coast of southern California, USA. The species also once occurred on neighboring islands, though it is not known when or why those populations went extinct. The population currently appears to be stable, but concerns about long-term viability of jays on Santa Cruz Island have raised the question of whether a population of jays should be re-established on one of those neighboring islands, Santa Rosa. To address that question, managers need to understand when and why the jay population went extinct on Santa Rosa Island: did it go extinct “naturally” in prehistoric time, or did it go extinct more recently due to anthropogenic factors? Depending on which it is, a reintroduction either would be consistent with a general interpretation of National Park Service (NPS) policy—i.e., restoring parks to their historic, natural condition—or it would be a more interventionist manipulation of the landscape, possibly even an “impairment” of the park. Case studies like this highlight potential conflicts between existing policy and broader conservation goals, and