- Maintain and improve the sustainability and native biodiversity of ecosystems.
- Administer with consideration of ecological units and timeframes.
- Support sustainable human activities.
- Develop a vision of ecosystem health.
- Develop priorities and reconcile conflicts.
- Develop coordinated approaches to work toward ecosystem health, e.g., involving the military operational community and other stakeholders in discussions.
- Rely on the best science and data available.
- Use benchmarks to monitor and evaluate outcomes.
- Use adaptive management.
- Implement ecosystem management through installation plans and programs.
An assessment of the implications of ecosystem management for threatened and endangered species conservation on Army lands (Trame and Tazik 1995) provides insights and identifies challenges for the transition between traditional speciescentric approaches and ecosystem management: “The transition to ecosystem management will be challenged by several technical hurdles:
1. Ecosystem management will be more effective if threatened and endangered
species management is done over large geographic areas, beyond the boundaries
of the installations;
2. Ecosystem management will be more effective if managers have a thorough
accounting of the native species, communities, and ecosystems that occur or would
occur under natural conditions on their installations; it is a data-intensive approach;
3. Native elements need to be understood well enough that their relative roles in the
ecosystem can be evaluated, threats to their existence can be identified, and “focal
elements” can be identified for detailed planning efforts;
4. Management planning and activities should be shifted to a landscape scale, so
that linkages and relationships among various regions of the installation can be
recognized; and 5. A scientifically defensible, adaptive management monitoring
framework will help capture advances in knowledge and improve management
actions through a continuous feedback cycle.”
Trame and Tazik (1995) also predicted that “the overall management goals will shift away from income generation through extractive land use [read: timber management, livestock grazing, game management], towards conservation of biodiversity, ecosystem health, and biotic integrity.” They also describe a broadening of spatial and temporal scales associated with management as well as an expansion of expertise and incorporation of neighboring landowners to better manage TES using a regional approach. Incredibly, much of what they forecasted is becoming more commonplace on DoD lands.
Although ecosystem management is not specifically mentioned in the 1997 SAIA requiring the development of INRMPS, during the 2000s ecosystem management became more firmly embedded in natural resources management and INRMPS. According to DoD Instruction 4715.03 (March 2011, incorporating change 2 August 2018) DOD shall follow an ecosystem-based management approach to natural resources-related practices and decisions, using scientifically sound conservation procedures, techniques, and data, and each INRMP “shall incorporate the principles of ecosystem-based management.” Furthermore, DoD Instruction 4715.03 states that biodiversity conservation on DoD lands and waters should be followed whenever practicable to:
- Maintain or restore remaining native ecosystem types across their natural range of variation.
- Maintain or reestablish viable populations of native species on an installation, when practical.
- Maintain ecological processes, such as disturbance regimes, hydrological processes, and nutrient cycles, to the extent practicable.
- Manage and monitor resources over sufficiently long time periods to allow for adaptive management and assessment of changing ecosystem dynamics (i.e., incorporate a monitoring component to management plans).
As described above, the concepts, policies and guidance were being developed in the 1990s, and to some degree the profile of ecosystem management was raised in the initial INRMPs leading up to the 2001 deadline. However, execution of policies and guidance within installation programs and INRMPs continued to be incomplete.
A study examining the level of ecosystem management implemented across the military found that information and sufficient detail was lacking across the military services on ecosystem management, inventorying, monitoring, adaptive management and partnerships (Fittipaldi and Wuichet 2002). The study also concluded that some technical aspects of ecosystem management were poorly understood and could inhibit successful implementation of ecosystem management. Among study findings were:
• DoD ecosystem management policy is not reflected in Service-level policy
and implementation guidance.
• Ecosystem management is incorrectly viewed as a separate activity requiring
its own line item in natural resources budgets. Funding non-compliance related
ecosystem management projects is difficult and this hinders effective
implementation.
• An adequate number of staff trained in ecosystem management principles is
lacking. In general, natural resources staffs are small and, in many cases
consist of only one natural resource manager; lack of staff can directly limit
implementation.
• Low organizational status of natural resource managers impedes effective
communication with others on the installation and in the region, and furthers
reluctance among managers to partner with non-military entities in the region.
Ineffective communication can also adversely impact implementation.
Fittipaldi and Wuichet (2002) proposed the following policy recommendations to ensure that ecosystem management is fully implemented and integrated within the day-to-day operations of all military departments:
- Promulgate and disseminate Service-level policy and guidance.
- Move closer to the goal of the DoD Instruction, where ecosystem management principles become not just special projects isolated from the rest of an installation’s environmental program, but rather where they form the basis of decision making at the installation level. Require proposals for new or continuing special projects to demonstrate how they will accomplish or embody the ten principles in the Instruction, and require all INRMPs, as well as the projects proposed to implement them, to demonstrate how they will support the accomplishment of ecosystem management goals and objectives.
- Train staff and inform leaders at installations and Regional Environmental Offices on the principles of ecosystem management as described in the existing DoD Instruction and the recommended new Service-level policy and guidance.
Several years later, in the Legacy report “Best Practices for Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan (INRMP) Implementation,” Gibb (2005a) believed there to be a good understanding of ecosystem management and that its application to day-to-day management had continued to improve as compared to the findings by Fittipaldi and Wuichet (2002). Refining and improving the ecosystem management aspects of the INRMP was reported by the natural resource managers to be the main focus for many of the INRMPs that required update or revision in the mid 2000s.
However, Gibb noted that there is still considerable room for improvement: “Although the process of ecosystem management is reasonably well understood and accepted, it is still not being fully practiced. The reasons for this are several and are not new— insufficient funds for INRMP projects and the oftentimes overwhelming emphasis on threatened and endangered species compliance management have been previously reported [by Fittipaldi and Wuichet 2002]…Commercial forestry should not be a focus of natural resources management on installations, [as] forestry goals may also compete with or be contrary to ecosystem health goals and objectives. There are four recognizable key areas to ecosystem management: 1) identifying and describing a vision for the installation (that is, a current and desired future condition or state); 2) identifying goals and objectives to move the installation in the direction of its vision or desired future condition; 3) having a monitoring program in place to measure progress to the goals and objectives; and 4) conducting adaptive management as needed to keep the installation on track, should monitoring indicate that progress is not being made as planned. Most installations included in the study have some or all of these elements in place; however, few have a comprehensive approach where there is a good linkage between the projects and activities conducted on the ground to progress towards the stated goals and objectives. Of these four elements, the area most lacking is monitoring, with few installations having a mechanism in place to determine progress.”
A more recent study by Li and Male (2020) examined how DoD might expand or improve its conservation efforts on and around military lands over the coming decade. Among numerous recommendations about how improved landscape-scale planning could benefit national defense and conservation, they offered the following with respect to INRMPs: “Few people in the conservation community engage in the process for revising these plans, even when public comment is sought. More broadly, our observation is that the management plans have generally not served their goal of being integrated with FWS and state wildlife agency decisions. One reason for the poor engagement is that the wildlife agencies lack the resources to fully participate in plan development and revisions. Another reason is that some plans are drafted by contractors using a process that has not been designed to maximize engagement and buy-in from other federal agencies and stakeholders, although this process appears to enable efficient drafting of the plans.”
They suggest several specific recommendations to improve the INRMP process:
- Evaluate the effectiveness of INRMP projects/activities: Researchers should study how the plans are developed and what effects they have had on conservation. Many outcomes of the INRMPs are anecdotal because no one has performed a comprehensive study of the documents and identified the best opportunities to improve the planning process.
- Increase funding to enable federal and state wildlife agencies to engage more effectively in plan development.
- Add capacity at the FWS to improve the planning process.
Next Page: The Mission and the INRMP
Author
David S. Jones, RA IV, Ecologist/Project Manager
Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands
Warner College of Natural Resources
Colorado State University
The Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan: Foundations and Key Topics
INRMP drivers and underpinnings
Box 5.1: Black-capped Vireo at Fort Hood and Fort Sill: INRMP captures commitments after delisting