Towards adaptive fire management for biodiversity conservation: Experience in South African National Parks

Wilgen, Brian W. van; Govender, Navashni; Forsyth, Gregory G.; Kraaij, Tineke

doi:10.4102/koedoe.v54i1.982

Cited by 10 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Natural resource management professionals involved in adaptive management learned mostly through assessment, i.e., direct evaluation (e.g., Biggs et al 2011, Kingsford et al 2011, Martin and Pope 2011, Bonanno 2013, Giebels et al 2013, as well as through experimentation and reflection (e.g., Briceño-Linares et al , Bunnefeld et al 2011, Johnson 2011, Smith 2011, Van Wilgen et al 2011, Marcot et al 2012, and to a lesser extent through dialogue (e.g., Foxcroft and McGeoch 2011, Moore et al 2011, Kelly et al 2012, Varady et al 2013). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning in Adaptive Management: Insights from Published Practice

Fabricius¹,

Cundill²

2014

E&S

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ABSTRACT. Adaptive management is often advocated as a solution to understanding and managing complexity in social-ecological systems. Given the centrality of learning in adaptive management, it remains unclear how learning in adaptive management is understood to occur, who learns, what they learn about, and how they learn. We conducted a systematic review using the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and searched specifically for examples of the practical implementation of adaptive management between 2011 and 2013, i.e., excluding articles that suggested frameworks, models, or recommendations for future action. This provided a subset of 22 papers that were analyzed using five elements: the aims of adaptive management as stated in each paper; the reported achievements of adaptive management; what was learned; who learned; and how they learned. Our results indicate that, although most published adaptive management initiatives aimed at improvements in biological conservation or ecosystem management, scholars of adaptive management tend to report on learning more about governance and about learning, than about ecosystems or biological conservation. Whereas almost all the papers (91%) listed improvements in biological conservation and ecosystem management as aims, 59% reported these as achievements. Whereas only 27% listed improved governance as an aim, 73% mentioned this as an achievement. Conservation scientists and academics reporting on adaptive management tend to learn among themselves, and very seldom (18%) with external stakeholders. Adaptive ecosystem management is dominated by direct assessment and single-loop learning aimed at improving existing practices (86%), with about 50% engaged in double-loop learning and a similar number in deutero-learning (learning about learning). Some adaptive managers (36%) combined double-and single-loop learning and the majority of these (6/8) reported on conservation achievements. A possible explanation for these findings is that adaptive management is an evolutionary process and in most instances is still in an early pioneering stage, possibly held back by participants' capacity for learning. The constraint of learning capacity may also explain why so few adaptive management initiatives reported on learning with societal stakeholders.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning in Adaptive Management: Insights from Published Practice

Fabricius¹,

Cundill²

2014

E&S

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, culling of elephants raises major ethical concerns and has led to proposed tourism boycotts with major implications for the financial viability of the park system. Similarly, preserving the fire-adapted savanna ecosystems of the Kruger Park requires specific types of fires, such as high-intensity fires at hot and dry times of the year, but these fires threaten the safety of people living in and adjacent Ecology and Society 20(1): 52 http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss1/art52/ to the park (van Wilgen et al 2011). Further complicating the situation is the fact that the impacts of elephants are difficult to disentangle from the effects of fire (Scholes and Mennell 2008).…”

Section: Elephant and Fire Management In The Kruger Park South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategies for managing complex social-ecological systems in the face of uncertainty: examples from South Africa and beyond

Biggs¹,

Rhode²,

Archibald³

et al. 2015

E&S

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ABSTRACT. Improving our ability to manage complex, rapidly changing social-ecological systems is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. This is particularly crucial if large-scale poverty alleviation is to be secured without undermining the capacity of the environment to support future generations. To address this challenge, strategies that enable judicious management of socialecological systems in the face of substantive uncertainty are needed. Several such strategies are emerging from the developing body of work on complexity and resilience. We identify and discuss four strategies, providing practical examples of how each strategy has been applied in innovative ways to manage turbulent social-ecological change in South Africa and the broader region: (1) employ adaptive management or comanagement, (2) engage and integrate different perspectives, (3) facilitate self-organization, and (4) set safe boundaries to avoid system thresholds. Through these examples we aim to contribute a basis for further theoretical development, new teaching examples, and inspiration for developing innovative new management strategies in other regions that can help address the considerable sustainability challenges facing society globally.

show abstract

“…This has resulted in a move from prescribed fire with fixed intervals, rotated over a fixed area, to one which introduces variability to the fire regime, often termed patch mosaic burning, or PMB (Bond and Archibald 2003;Van Wilgen et al 2011). PMB introduces variability into the fire regime by varying the fire regime attributes of adjacent patches (e.g.…”

Section: Fire -A Land Management Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mulqueeny et al 2010;Van Wilgen 1998;Van Wilgen et al 2004). Point ignitions are also thought to burn under a variety of intensities within a single fire as compared with other methods such as perimeter ignitions (see Mulqueeny et al 2010;Van Wilgen et al 2011).…”

Section: Approaches To Mosaic Burningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Approaches that promote pyrodiversity contrast with approaches employing prescribed burns with fixed fire intervals and season of burn (Bond and Archibald 2003), or a focus on minimum and maximum fire return intervals that promote variability but within pre-determined bounds (Burrows 2008;Clarke 2008;Van Wilgen et al 2011). These approaches to fire management are assumed to reduce diversity in a landscape by homogenising vegetation structure and composition across large areas (Van Wilgen et al 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Drivers of diversity at the local- and landscape-scale in a fire-prone landscape

Burgess¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Determining the factors that generate and maintain patterns of biodiversity is a challenge central to ecology. To effectively manage heterogeneous landscapes for biodiversity conservation there is a need to understand the mechanisms driving the relationship between spatial heterogeneity and species richness at multiple scales. Disturbances such as fire affect landscape heterogeneity and are important influences on the distribution and abundance of biota across a range of scales. A key challenge for biodiversity conservation in fire-prone ecosystems is thus to understand the influence of fire on biotic communities.Contemporary ecological fire management resounds with the term 'pyrodiversity'. Efforts to achieve pyrodiversity are usually motivated by the rationale that increasing gamma diversity relies upon maintaining a mosaic of patches of different fire histories. From a global review of literature, this thesis revealed that despite widespread acceptance of this paradigm, the evidence supporting it is extremely sparse. This dearth of knowledge of how heterogeneity affects biota limits effective application of the mosaic burning approach. Studies that consider the spatial and temporal attributes of the fire regime mosaic, and investigate the relationship between these and multiple taxa at different spatial scales, are urgently required.To respond to this knowledge gap, this thesis investigated the effects of fire history and habitat heterogeneity on structure and composition of floral and avifaunal communities. This thesis tests hypotheses about the importance of variable fire regimes, spatial heterogeneity, extent of habitat, and local-and landscape-responses on birds and their habitat in the fire-prone sub-tropical woodlands of central Queensland. Two methods were used to collect the data: i) digital mapping and characterisation of the fire regime mosaic; and ii) surveys of woody vegetation and avifaunal communities.The post-fire response of vegetation reflects not only a single fire event but is the result of cumulative effects of previous fires in the landscape. Fire history categories based on unique combinations of time since last burn, fire frequency and season of last burn were developed and used to map the fire regime mosaic of the study area. This thesis establishes that fire history category strongly influences richness and abundance of mid-storey trees and of individual plants currently comprising the mid-level strata. The particular elements of fire history, time since fire and fire frequency, had the strongest influence on vegetation structure. A longer time since fire (> 4 years since last burn) combined with infrequent fires (< 2 fires in 12 year period) appeared to iii promote a dense mid-storey with the opposite conditions promoting more-open woodlands. This is of particular relevance for conservation management of woodland birds that have been shown to respond strongly to habitat structural variables in the study area.Landscape heterogeneity and extent of habitat are each expected to c...

show abstract

Towards adaptive fire management for biodiversity conservation: Experience in South African National Parks

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Learning in Adaptive Management: Insights from Published Practice

Learning in Adaptive Management: Insights from Published Practice

Strategies for managing complex social-ecological systems in the face of uncertainty: examples from South Africa and beyond

Drivers of diversity at the local- and landscape-scale in a fire-prone landscape

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About