Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources.

Abstract

In Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources, noted theoretician Carl Walters challenges the traditional approach to dealing with uncertainty in the management of such renewable resources as fish and wildlife. He argues that scientific understanding will come from the experience of management as an ongoing, adaptive, and experimental process, rather than through basic research or the development of ecological theory.In the opening chapters, Walters reviews approaches to formulating management objectives as well as models for understanding how policy choices affect the attainment of these objectives. In subsequent chapters he presents various statistical methods for understanding the dynamics of uncertainty in managed fish and wildlife populations and for seeking optimum harvest policies in the face of uncertainty. Walters concludes with a look at prospects for adaptive management of complex systems, emphasizing such human factors involved in decision making as risk aversion and conflicting objectives as well as biophysical factors. Throughout the text he uses dynamic models and Bayesian statistical theory as tools for understanding the behavior of managed systems, and he illustrates these tools with simple graphs and plots of data from representative cases.This text/reference will serve researchers, graduate students, and resource managers who formulate harvest policies and study the dynamics of harvest populations, as well as analysts (modelers, statisticians, and stock assessment experts) who are concerned with the practice of policy design.

Evaluating Golden‐winged Warbler use of alder and aspen communities managed with shearing in the western Great Lakes

“…As the use of shearing becomes increasingly popular for shrubland management, development and refinement of science‐based BMPs specific to this practice will remain important. As new information becomes available, we recommend using an adaptive management process to assess and improve shearing BMPs (Walters, 1986). Ultimately, our study provides support for the use of shearing as a conservation practice in managing habitat for Golden‐winged Warblers in the western Great Lakes region.…”

An Infrastructure Perspective for Enhancing Multi‐functionality of Forests: A Conceptual Modeling Approach

“…There is still value in improving the model with a better indicator of biodiversity that can potentially better highlight ecological trade-offs in the forest. Moreover, much work is also needed with the introduction of the concept of nonphysical (or soft) infrastructures or "knowledge infrastructure" (Anderies et al, 2019) to the interplay between the forest functions and its ecosystem highlighting the adaptive management concept (Walters, 1987). From a general standpoint, viability theory (Aubin, 1991) can be useful in defining safe operating spaces (Carpenter et al, 2015(Carpenter et al, , 2017Mathias et al, 2018;Rockström et al, 2009) for governing functions as individuals, and common safe operating spaces for the forest multifunctionality.…”

Implementing Ecosystem-Based Management Principles in the Design of a Salmon Ocean Ecology Program

“…Tier 4 evaluates management scenario tradeoffs and Tier 5 provides advice to managers. The sixth tier is an adaptive management approach (Walters, 1986) and involves progressive re-evaluation of outcomes in response to variability in ecosystem structure, function, and management, and realigns objectives, research, and management with contemporary conditions. If re-evaluation indicated a need to modify approaches, practitioners should regress to a previous tier and rebuild from that point forward (Figure 1B).…”