Strategic adaptive management planning—Restoring a desert ecosystem by managing introduced species and native herbivores and reintroducing mammals

Abstract

Arid rangelands are degraded worldwide, suffering vegetation transformation, soil erosion, introductions, and extinctions. Wild deserts is restoring a desert ecosystem in Sturt National Park, New South Wales, Australia (35,000 ha), eradicating or controlling introduced animals, managing native herbivores, and reintroducing regionally extinct mammals. We describe a Strategic Adaptive Management Plan for restoration of this desert ecosystem, including a vision, model of ecosystem processes, stakeholder input, a hierarchy of objectives linked to triggers and their management actions, producing outcomes and outputs. Our management treatments included two "no restoration" areas and three "restoration" areas. The latter include two exclosures (each 2,000 ha), free of introduced animals (foxes, cats, rabbits), with previously abundant kangaroos removed and regionally extinct mammals to be reintroduced. The third management treatment is a Wild Training Zone (10,400 ha), with introduced animals and kangaroos managed at low levels, using innovative methods, improving survivorship and avoidance behavior of reintroduced mammals to introduced predators. These measures will allow populations of threatened animals to establish, initially in the exclosures, then the Wild Training Zone and potentially more widely. Our strategic adaptive management planning approach is generic and implementable for any natural resource management project, providing explicit steps and processes that track and report transparently on outcomes, fostering learning by doing.

Adaptive Management of Malkumba-Coongie Lakes Ramsar Site in Arid Australia—A Free Flowing River and Wetland System

“…There is increasing effort to better document management and planning for natural resource management, through various planning and management approaches [20][21][22]25,61,62]. These efforts predominantly focus on increased specificity and linking of high level objectives to management actions, providing clear timelines and triggers and/or TPC's to guide monitoring and management.…”

“…Strategic Adaptive Management is well established in South Africa and has the necessary rigor to incorporate all these key elements. It was established to deal with river management, where outside pressures of water quality and development were difficult to control [21,27], and is increasingly applicable to freshwater ecosystems around the world [20,26] and other conservation management issues [22,25,56]. There is considerable opportunity to use this framework for the management of Ramsar Sites around the world, allowing for the effective tracking of ecological character.…”

“…Strategic Adaptive Management (SAM) is an approach, explicitly identifying values and key processes which underpin the conservation management system, usually drawn up as a plan [19][20][21]. It is a version of natural resource management that skillfully links science, monitoring and management within a learning-by-doing approach [22], focusing on stakeholder collaboration and effective knowledge management [21,23], applicable for a range of natural resource applications [24][25][26]. Importantly, for rivers, such a structured management approach can capture the dependencies of a particular wetland ecosystem on upstream processes, in the attributes, values and engagement of stakeholders.…”

“…From this, an explicit hierarchy of objectives is developed, increasing in specificity [27]. At the most detailed level, these objectives can be converted into actions and linked to specific indicators, outputs and outcomes for any ecosystem [21,25]. Actions can be triggered when Thresholds of Potential Concern (TPCs) are exceeded [28], or close to being exceeded, informed by targeted monitoring programs [29].…”

The Perils of Being Populous: Control and Conservation of Abundant Kangaroo Species

“…The focus is on reducing their abundance rather than any incremental action. Their abundance and grazing are viewed as a threatening process in conservation management in protected and other areas, e.g., [21]. Thus, the final aim is to explore the generality of this contention and the interplay between studies showing benefits or benign effects of kangaroo populations, and those promoting a contrary result.…”