Judging adaptive management practices of U.S. agencies

A landmark environmental law looks ahead

In late December 1973, the United States enacted what some would come to call "the pitbull of environmental laws." In the 50 years since, the formidable regulatory teeth of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been credited with considerable successes, obliging agencies to draw upon the best available science to protect species and habitats. Yet human pressures continue to push the planet toward extinctions on a massive scale. With that prospect looming, and with scientific understanding ever changing, Science invited experts to discuss how the ESA has evolved and what its future might hold. -Brad Wible.

Understanding and overcoming obstacles in adaptive management

Adaptive management (AM) is widely promoted to improve management of natural resources, yet its implementation is challenging. We show that obstacles to the implementation of AM are related not only to the AM process per se but also to external factors such as ecosystem properties and governance systems. To overcome obstacles, there is a need to build capacities within the AM process by ensuring adequate resources, management tools, collaboration, and learning. Additionally, building capacities in the legal and institutional frames can enable the necessary flexibility in the governance system. Furthermore, in systems experiencing profound changes in wildlife populations, building such capacities may be even more critical as more flexibility will be needed to cope with increased uncertainty and changed environmental conditions.

Managing Groundwater to Ensure Ecosystem Function

Groundwater is a critical resource not only for human communities but also for many terrestrial, riparian, and aquatic ecosystems and species. Yet groundwater planning and management decisions frequently ignore or inadequately address the needs of these natural systems. As a consequence, ecosystems dependent on groundwater have been threatened, degraded, or eliminated, especially in arid regions. There is growing acknowledgment that governmental protections for these ecological resources are necessary, but current legal, regulatory and voluntary provisions are often inadequate. Groundwater management premised on "safe yield," which aims to balance human withdrawals with natural recharge rates, typically provides little to no consideration for water needed by ecosystems. Alternatively, the "sustainable yield" concept aims to integrate social, economic and environmental needs for groundwater, but the complexity of groundwater systems creates substantial uncertainty about the impact that current or future groundwater withdrawals will have on ecosystems. Regardless of the legal or regulatory framework, guidance is needed to help ensure environmental water needs will be met, especially in the face of pressure to increase human uses of groundwater resources. In this paper, we describe minimum provisions for planning, managing, and monitoring groundwater that collectively can lower the risk of harm to groundwater-dependent ecosystems and species, with a special emphasis on arid systems, where ecosystems and species may be especially reliant upon and sensitive to groundwater dynamics.

Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science

BACKGROUND

Over the last several decades, scientists and social groups have frequently raised concerns about politicization or political interference in regulatory science. Public actors (environmentalists and industry advocates, politically aligned public figures, scientists and political commentators, in the United States as well as in other countries) across major political-regulatory controversies have expressed concerns about the inappropriate politicization of science. Although we share concerns about the politicization of science, they are frequently framed in terms of an ideal of value-free science, according to which political and economic values have no legitimate role to play in science. For several decades, work in philosophy of science has identified serious conceptual and practical problems with the value-free ideal.

OBJECTIVES

Our objectives are to discuss the literature regarding the conceptual and practical problems with the value-free ideal and offer a constructive alternative to the value-free ideal.

DISCUSSION

We first discuss the prevalence of the value-free ideal in regulatory science, then argue that this ideal is self-undermining and has been exploited to delay protective regulation. To offer a constructive alternative, we analyze the relationship between the goals of regulatory science and the standards of good scientific activity. This analysis raises questions about the relationship between methodological and practical standards for good science, tensions among various important social goods, and tensions among various social interests. We argue that the aims of regulatory science help to legitimize value-laden choices regarding research methods and study designs. Finally, we discuss how public deliberation, adaptive management, and community-based participatory research can be used to improve the legitimacy of scientists as representatives of the general public on issues of environmental knowledge.

CONCLUSIONS

Reflecting on the aims of regulatory science-such as protecting human health and the environment, informing democratic deliberation, and promoting the capacities of environmental justice and Indigenous communities-can clarify when values have legitimate roles in regulatory science. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP3317.

Implementing Landscape Scale Conservation across Organizational Boundaries: Lessons from the Central Appalachian Region, United States

Natural resources across the United States are increasingly managed at the landscape scale through cooperation among multiple organizations and landowners. United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS) agency leaders have widely promoted this approach since 2009 when Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack called for "all lands" management. Landscape scale projects have been undertaken to address multiple goals such as single species conservation, resilience to fire, invasive species eradication, and others. The West Virginia Restoration Venture (WVRV)-one of five landscape scale conservation projects funded 2014-2016 across the Northeast and Midwest and known as "Joint Chiefs'" projects-was evaluated by an interdisciplinary team of USFS employees to gain insight into how cross-boundary landscape scale conservation projects are implemented in the region. In this paper, the team used qualitative interview data from project participants to explore processes related to developing a shared vision for the landscape, implementation priorities, and methods to work across institutional and property ownership boundaries. Grounded in the landscape and collaborative resource management literatures, the report shows how established inter-organizational networks, flexible approaches to management, and a "shelf-stock" of ready-to-implement projects led to on-the-ground success. The authors provide insight about factors that constrain and facilitate the implementation of landscape scale conservation projects that have multiple goals, landowners, and organizational partners.

AMModels: An R package for storing models, data, and metadata to facilitate adaptive management

Agencies are increasingly called upon to implement their natural resource management programs within an adaptive management (AM) framework. This article provides the background and motivation for the R package, AMModels. AMModels was developed under R version 3.2.2. The overall goal of AMModels is simple: To codify knowledge in the form of models and to store it, along with models generated from numerous analyses and datasets that may come our way, so that it can be used or recalled in the future. AMModels facilitates this process by storing all models and datasets in a single object that can be saved to an .RData file and routinely augmented to track changes in knowledge through time. Through this process, AMModels allows the capture, development, sharing, and use of knowledge that may help organizations achieve their mission. While AMModels was designed to facilitate adaptive management, its utility is far more general. Many R packages exist for creating and summarizing models, but to our knowledge, AMModels is the only package dedicated not to the mechanics of analysis but to organizing analysis inputs, analysis outputs, and preserving descriptive metadata. We anticipate that this package will assist users hoping to preserve the key elements of an analysis so they may be more confidently revisited at a later date.

An adaptive management case study for managing macropods on Maria Island National Park, Tasmania, Australia: adding devils to the detail

Adaptive management is driven by structured decision making and evidence from monitoring in a ‘learning’ framework that guides management actions. In a conservation context, this iterative approach includes evaluation of the impacts on natural processes. On Maria Island National Park, Tasmania, Australia, introduced Forester kangaroo, Bennetts wallaby and Tasmanian pademelon have been intensively managed by an annual cull since 1994. Management actions were triggered by high parasite loads, intense grazing pressure and high juvenile mortality during drought periods. Criticism of the annual cull from animal welfare groups initiated the development of an adaptive management approach for decision making that replaces the historic ‘trial and error’ process. Following a comprehensive review of the existing macropod management program in 2011, an integrated monitoring strategy was established to provide evidence for informed decision making. Assessments of animal health and estimates of population trends are the key indicators for management actions to occur. Maintaining viable macropod populations and protecting natural values form the basis of management objectives. Management actions in each year, for each species, represent ‘treatments’ as spatial replication is not possible at such a small scale. An adaptive management approach for macropod management on Maria Island has resulted in only one species being culled in 2014 and 2015 for the first time in almost 20 years. However the recent introduction of a major predator, the Tasmanian devil, has increased uncertainty for long-term macropod management on Maria Island with no cull occurring in 2016 and 2017.

Adaptive management of large aquatic ecosystem recovery programs in the United States

Adaptive management (AM) is being employed in a number of programs in the United States to guide actions to restore aquatic ecosystems because these programs are both expensive and are faced with significant uncertainties. Many of these uncertainties are associated with prioritizing when, where, and what kind of actions are needed to meet the objectives of enhancing ecosystem services and recovering threatened and endangered species. We interviewed nine large-scale aquatic ecosystem restoration programs across the United States to document the lessons learned from implementing AM. In addition, we recorded information on ecological drivers (e.g., endangered fish species) for the program, and inferred how these drivers reflected more generic ecosystem services. Ecosystem services (e.g., genetic diversity, cultural heritage), albeit not explicit drivers, were either important to the recovery or enhancement of the drivers, or were additional benefits associated with actions to recover or enhance the program drivers. Implementing programs using AM lessons learned has apparently helped achieve better results regarding enhancing ecosystem services and restoring target species populations. The interviews yielded several recommendations. The science and AM program must be integrated into how the overall restoration program operates in order to gain understanding and support, and effectively inform management decision-making. Governance and decision-making varied based on its particular circumstances. Open communication within and among agency and stakeholder groups and extensive vetting lead up to decisions. It was important to have an internal agency staff member to implement the AM plan, and a clear designation of roles and responsibilities, and long-term commitment of other involved parties. The most important management questions and information needs must be identified up front. It was imperative to clearly identify, link and continually reinforce the essential components of an AM plan, including objectives, constraints, uncertainties, hypotheses, management actions, decision criteria and triggers, monitoring, and research. Some employed predictive models and the results of research on uncertainties to vet options for actions. Many relied on best available science and professional judgment to decide if adjustments to actions were needed. All programs emphasized the need to be nimble enough to be responsive to new information and make necessary adjustments to management action implementation. We recommend that ecosystem services be explicit drivers of restoration programs to facilitate needed funding and communicate to the general public and with the global efforts on restoring and conserving ecosystems.

Guidance on the Use of Best Available Science under the U.S. Endangered Species Act

The Endangered Species Act's best available science mandate has been widely emulated and reflects a Congressional directive to ensure that decisions made under the Act are informed by reliable knowledge applied using a structured approach. We build on a standing literature by describing the role of the best science directive in the Act's implementation and best practices that can be employed to realize the directive. Next we describe recurring impediments to realizing determinations by the federal wildlife agencies that are based on the best available science. We then identify the types of data, analyses, and modeling efforts that can serve as best science. Finally, we consider the role and application of best available science in effects analysis and adaptive management. We contend that more rigorous adherence by the wildlife agencies to the best available science directive and more assiduous judicial oversight of agency determinations and actions is essential for effective implementation of the Act, particularly where it has substantial ramifications for listed species, stakeholder segments of society, or both.