Biodiversity conservation on military lands does not equate with outright preservation or the exclusion of military uses. Creatively using an ecosystem management approach and working with the military community, have produced impressive results at many installations, several of which are chronicled in this manual. One key component is to use an adaptive approach to conservation planning and implementation.
Definitions of adaptive management vary by context, but the commonalities include the appreciation that “ecosystems are not more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think” (Egler 1977). Despite this uncertainty, success is possible with thoughtful planning.
The basic premises of adaptive management are:
- We don’t know enough to predict all outcomes. Changing management, and changing military activities, will undoubtedly result in unanticipated results, as will purely natural, but unpredictable, events. A key is to learn from those events, capture the learning from that experience, and build it into our understanding of the systems.
- Everything is an experiment; every project provides an opportunity to learn and improve. This doesn’t mean that every activity needs to be designed as a rigorous scientific experiment. Rather, we must enter every process with our eyes open, asking two questions up front: “If this doesn’t work out as I expect, what do I want to know in order to do it better next time?” And, “If this does work out, what can I learn from this place that will allow me to carry that success to other situations?”
- There is no simple protocol for implementing adaptive management. However, there are some keystones to successful adaptive management, all related to documenting the ecological and management processes, the Page 75 of 293 shared understanding of the system(s), and explicitly stating the assumptions and uncertainties before undertaking actions.
- Providing “just so” stories about why a project didn’t succeed after the fact is not adaptive. Nor does it facilitate learning. The military has embedded After Action Reviews (AARs) into most of its work to overcome this. These reviews focus on four key questions: What were our intended results? What were our actual results? What caused our results? And what will we sustain or improve? Anticipating asking these questions after every management action can make management planning adaptive. Of course, this requires management teams to agree on, and explicitly state, their intended results a priori. And, taking the time to measure their actual results in a meaningful manner.
The conservation community has collaboratively developed standards and tools for designing, managing, monitoring and learning from conservation projects. This work has been codified in the Conservation Standards developed by the Conservation Measures Partnership https://conservationstandards.org/. This partnership has created a software package Miradi that helps guide planners through the process of creating an adaptive management plan. The software is available at https://miradi.org/. While it is not possible to directly translate Miradi’s products into an INRMP, integrating the thought process inherent in the software can help a team create an adaptive INRMP.
Next Page: Planning for biodiversity conservation
Author
Bob Unnasch, Ph.D.
Sound Science LLC
Conservation in practice
Learning to think like a mountain: Tools for conservation practitioners