Ecosystem Management

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Ecosystem Management

• Part IV Integration
• Chapin, Matson, Mooney
• Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology

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Human activities influence ALL ecosystems

• Land-use change
• Modification of global environment
• Therefore, we MUST manage all ecosystems
• Decisions to do nothing will cause them to change
• We are the causes of most changes have an
  ethical responsibility to manage

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Principles of management

• State factors constrain possible management
  options (cant be managed)
• Slow variables can be managed
• Conserve slow variables
• Soil resources
• Disturbance regime
• Functional groups of organisms
• Human activities

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Principles of management(short-term goals)

• 1. Conserve slow variables
• 2. Maintain and enhance negative feedbacks
• e.g., population control by predators
• 3. Maintain natural landscape linkages
• Land-water interactions

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Principles of management(long-term goals)

• 4. Maximize resilience
• Diversity
• Opportunities for learning
• Adaptive capacity
• Flexibility to adjust to changes

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Sustainable Forestry

• Define attributes to be sustained
• Ecosystem goods
• Ecosystem services
• Manage the slow variables
• Disturbance
• Soil resources
• Functional types

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1. Cut forests to increase water supply to
cities Runoff decreases after forest
harvest Less transpiration More runoff
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Sustainable Fisheries

• Define attributes to be sustained
• Ecosystem goods
• Ecosystem services
• Manage the interactive controls
• Pollutants (resources)
• Functional types
• Maintain negative feedbacks
• Regulate fishing pressure

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Ecosystem Restoration

• Develop positive feedbacks that enhance recovery
• Nitrogen fixers
• Mycorrhizae
• SOM accumulation

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Management for endangered species

• Conserve slow variables
• Enhance negative feedbacks
• Allow for change
• E.g., room for altitudinal migration

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Ecosystem Management

• Management for sustainability
• Not management for a single product
• Sustainable flow of ecosystem services
• Addresses interactions between social and
  biophysical processes
• Considers people components of regional systems

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Adaptive Management

• Treat management as an experiment
• Manage according to hypotheses
• Learn from experience
• Change management based on results
• Lack of action in face of uncertainty is a
  decision
• May manage to minimize risk of disaster rather
  than to optimize results

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Integrated Conservation and Development
Projects(ICDPs)

• Assumes that conservation will not work unless it
  is socially and economically beneficial
• Difficult balance to achieve

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The big issues

• Many people have inadequate resources for a good
  life
• The Earth is changing
• Declining capacity to provide many renewable
  resources
• There arent enough renewable resources to meet
  everyones needs at the level the U.S. has come
  to expect
• Due to rising population and consumption
• This would require several planet earths to
  meet these expectations

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Earth is experiencing directional changes in many
drivers of social-ecological processes
Steffen et al. 2004
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Drivers of change
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We live in a directionally changing world
Mann et al. 1999
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Global to boreal
Mann et al.
Polar amplification
Chapin et al. 2005
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Many big issues deal with integrated
social-ecological systems
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If exogenous controls change substantially,
social-ecological systems will inevitably change
Chapin et al. 2006
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Sustaining Ecosystem Services The benefits
people obtain from ecosystems
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005
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Valuation of ecosystem goods and services

• Way to compare different management options
• New York City water example

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Ecological Institutions (Example of a systems
approach)
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Dynamics of change

• Equilibrium
• Steady state
• Directional change
• Alternative states

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Alternative stable states

• Legacies influence current state
• Path-dependence influences potential future states

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Brief review

• The world is changing rapidly and in a
  directional fashion
• Many changes are social-ecological in nature
• Traditional systems framework is limited in
  usefulness
• Complex adaptive system framework incorporates
  many attributes of social-ecological systems

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The dynamics of change

• Fast vs. slow variables
• Minimize changes in slow variables
• Adaptive cycles
• Change is more likely to occur at specific times

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Many processes exhibit a relatively predictable
pattern of change
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Adaptive cycle (Hollings pretzel) Description of
common patterns of change
Gunderson and Holling 2002
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Cross-scale interactions
Gunderson and Holling 2002
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Steady-state landscape mosaic
Gunderson and Holling 2002
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Modified from Chapin et al. 2006
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Policies to reduce vulnerability

• Reduce exposure to stress
• Mitigation of climate change
• Embrace the precautionary principal dont add
  new stresses
• Minimize sensitivity to changes in controls
  caused by stress
• Sustain natural and social capital
• Manage slow variables
• Maintain components of well-being
• (Enhance adaptability and resilience)
• Enhance equality of opportunity among
  stakeholders
• Issues of social justice
• i.e., reduce exposure/sensitivity of most
  vulnerable components of system

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An arctic example of incomplete
feedbacks (therefore difficult to reduce exposure
to this stress)
Chapin et al. 2006
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Policies to enhance adaptability

• Foster social, economic, institutional and
  ecological diversity
• Diversity increases the range of conditions under
  which the ecosystem functions effectively
• Provides building blocks for adaptation
• Foster social learning
• Cope with variability and change
• Integrate knowledge systems and approaches
• Integrating natural and social sciences
• Integrating scientific and traditional knowledge
• Experimentation and innovation
• Education and public outreach
• Management experiments
• Effective governance
• Select, communicate and implement appropriate
  solutions

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Policies to enhance resilience

• (Enhance adaptability)
• Sustain legacies that provide seeds for recovery
• Serves as latent source of diversity
• e.g., cultural ties to the land
• Resilience learning (build flexibility)
• Reduce uncertainty through research, but expect
  surprises
• Plan for the long term
• Feedbacks and disturbance
• Develop and strengthen stabilizing feedbacks
• Allow small disturbances to occur
• Adaptive governance
• Adaptive governance and adaptive management
• Develop alternative scenarios of future change
  for more informed planning

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Policies to enhance transformability

• Enhance adaptability and diversity
• Enhance capacity to learn from crisis (think
  outside the box)

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Sustainability What is it?

• Persistence of desirable features
• Maintenance of social-ecological interactions
• Equity across segments of society now and in the
  future

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Sustaining multiple services

• Managers often focus on one or a few services
• e.g., fish, soil fertility, fresh water
• Tradeoffs among services
• Single-service focus usually fails to maximize
  public benefits
• Sustainability requires sustaining multiple
  services

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Sustaining human well-being

• Material needs
• Health
• Good social relations
• Security (food, safety, etc.)
• Freedom

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Keys to sustainability

• Reduce vulnerability
• Ecosystem services
• Human material and health well-being
• Enhance adaptive capacity of the coupled system
• Foster resilience and transformability of the
  coupled system

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Translating into real-world issues
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Percent of Families Below the Poverty Level in
1999 2000
U.S. Census, TM-P069.