Warren and Ecolog: You are right about the need for more sophistication and deliberate action and thought. I'll try to build on your steps a bit by inserting a few thoughts [[thus WT]]. I hope others will do the same, and correct any errors as we go along. By applying adaptive management to THIS process, it will theoretically become further refined and realize/exemplify those needs as Aney suggests.
WT ----- Original Message ----- From: Warren W. Aney To: 'Wayne Tyson' ; [email protected] Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2011 8:32 PM Subject: RE: [ECOLOG-L] Conservation or just gardening? Wayne (and others):adaptive management is a strategic process that involves planning, action, monitoring and feedback. Some just call it learning by doing, but it can and should be more sophisticated and deliberate, perhaps something along the line of what I posted to this list in October: Step 1. Assess current ecosystem situation/condition. [[The level of sophistication has to vary, because "practical," "real-world" considerations always rear their ugly heads. At root, a glance, a photograph, a map, or other cursory assessment might have to do; certainly the more detailed the better. But perhaps equally important are the qualitative and interpretive dimensions of those needs, and resisting the temptation or enforcement of "decorative" data, bloated interpretation, and arbitrarily "determinations." I have often relied upon a procedural element I call "the roughest guess that gets the job done" standard of quality; this leaves one wide open for criticism, but that's as it should be. The rub comes in when the challenger determines that he/she is above challenging--power rears her ugly head. WT]] Step 2. Describe and agree on desired future/restored ecosystem condition. [[I believe someone (Warren?) said this might be the toughest one. One can "desire" all one wants, but one is not going to get one's way if the feasibility isn't there. "Desire" is arbitrary, someone's (usually the Authority's) whim about what constitutes "pure" or "pristine;" yet "feasible" is subject to manipulation too--there's a temptation to use feasibility to squirm out of all kinds of responsibilities. One could take an assessment literally, such as "restore 100 ha of old-growth forest in ninety days." This is clearly arbitrary and infeasible, but I can show you projects where gigantic costs were incurred to transplant mature trees that was an utter failure in conception, design, and execution in an attempt to reproduce some armchair experts idea of "pristine" based more on a personal aesthetic than ecosystem analysis. Has anyone else had a similar experience? WT]] Step 3. Define and agree on actions needed to reach desired condition. [[There needs to be a basis for the definition, usually from a combination of literature, comparable projects that have reached "desired condition," discipline experiments, sound theoretical foundations (e.g. plant-soil-water relations), and other experience. WT]] Step 4. Take bold but safe-to-fail actions. [[Yeah, nice to hope for, but often honored more in the breach than in the execution. Facing up to failures and figuring out why they occurred is often defeated by the prevalence of the cya phenomenon. WT]] Step 5. Monitor and evaluate results from desired ecosystem condition perspective. [[One always hopes for an adequate budget for monitoring and evaluation, but even the most expensive and extensive can fall into the window-dressing pit too. "Coverage" requirements continue to undermine things like diversity goals, and cause the "use" of aggressive species and tighter densities to achieve "standards" that are irrelevant to the, shall we say, "unbroken progress toward the pristine as possible" goal. I've personally caused some projects to collapse because I didn't have the guts or the power to insist upon "less is more." WT]] Step 6. Modify actions and/or expectations in light of results. [[I'm all for modifying actions, but have seen cases where well-intended modifications, did more damage than they repaired. Expectations need to be reduced at Step 2, but if not, better late than never. However, this should not be an easy-out for the practitioner who wants most to cover up mistakes rather than learn from them. WY]] Step 7. Continue with revised actions and monitoring. [[Sounds good, but nothing beats getting it right in the first place. Monitoring is wonderful if actually productive in measurable terms--it should primarily plot trends, including the overall trend, the primary standard for measuring any ecosystem project: Is the project improving or degrading? (Is reproduction/recruitment of indigenous species occurring or not? After an initial phase of "weediness," is there resistance to invasion? Are so-called "minor" components (e.g. cryptogamic soil crust species, indigenous grasses and geophytes, fungi, etc., not to mention indigenous animals present where habitat conditions for them are present? Etc. WT]] Step 8. Celebrate success. Defining desired ecosystem condition may be the most challenging step, but the 3 goals and considerations that Juan Alvez lists help us take that step. [[Amen. WT]] Warren W. Aney Senior Wildlife Ecologist Tigard, OR ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Wayne Tyson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 19 January, 2011 17:05 To: Warren W. Aney; [email protected] Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Conservation or just gardening? Well, yes. But I would suggest even more detail, and hope Aney will expand his outline. Also, when habitats have been degraded or essentially destroyed, as in, say, volcanic eruptions or surface mining, the issue of feasible future state is a question to be squarely addressed, as well as the timing and sequence of events, both artificial and natural that lead to that state, including markers that confirm whether or not progress toward them is occurring. In the "gardening" approach, for example, propagules may be introduced and monitored and desired states that are arbitrarily determined (e.g. a certain amount of "coverage" at a certain date) required that may or may not be feasible that could undermine, rather than advance, the three "Aney descriptors." In the ecosystem restoration approach, trend lines, including survivorship curves and measures of diversity are less forgiving and more to the point that the urgent cosmetics common to desire-based "standards," which may bear little resemblance to ecosystem processes, function, and successional structure. I hope Aney will contribute further on just how adaptive management would be applied. WT ----- Original Message ----- From: "Warren W. Aney" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 10:41 AM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Conservation or just gardening? Juan Alvez is right about having long term goals but leaves out important defining adjectives. Ecosystems structures, functions, processes and services exist regardless of ecosystem condition (even a crack in a paved parking lot is an ecosystem with structure, functions and maybe even some services). So we need to insert adjectives that describes a desired future state -- e.g., 1. Reestablishment of the naturally complex and stable ecosystem structure. 2. Reestablishment of the naturally diverse ecosystem functions and process. 3. Reestablishment of the productive flow of ecosystem services. Of course these modifiers would tend to be site dependent and I'm sure others can come up with better examples. And how about employing principles of adaptive management to make sure our efforts are both effective and informative? Warren W. Aney Senior Wildlife Ecologist Tigard, OR -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Juan P Alvez Sent: Tuesday, 18 January, 2011 19:53 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Conservation or just gardening? Ecologers, Building on Prof. W. Tyson's comment... I completely agree. Restoring a degraded ecosystem to its pristine pure stage is almost impossible, not to mention the costs involved in the mitigation process. There were (and still are) successful attempts of regenerating barren and ultra degraded places in Brazil (i.e. mine sites) by Prof. Ademir Reis and others. Prof. Reis also committed several mistakes in his attempts until he figured it out the best ways to achieve some sort of succession and vegetation. From my humble point of view, important long-term goal and considerations to have in mind are: 1. the reestablishment of ecosystem structure (not an easy task!); 2. the reestablishment of ecosystem functions and processes (consider yourself lucky when this is accomplished); 3. Finally, the reestablishment of the flow of ecosystem services. These events take time and resources but are worth doing. Just my 2 cts! Juan P. Alvez On 1/18/2011 4:04 PM, Wayne Tyson wrote: > Jason and Ecolog: > > > > Many years ago (early 1980's?) I did a "paper" that I think I called "Ecosystem Restoration and Landscaping: A Comparison." I don't remember the name of the conference and I'm not sure of the place, but it might have been one of the early conferences of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), maybe it's less-formal precursor, "Native Plant Restoration" or something like that, and I believe it was held in Berkeley, at some big old wooden hotel in the Berkeley Hills. I was a pretty young upstart, and I don't recall anyone paying much attention to it. [Note: I looked through some old files and found a folder: "Restoration and Landscaping: a Comparison." 2nd Native Plant Revegetation Symposium, 1987, but there was no paper in it. I was close but a bit foggy. Even it might be wrong; a search revealed other papers which said it was 1987 and the location was San Diego. Maybe a better searcher can find it, or maybe someone has the Proceedings--however, I can't even be sure that it was published. I wasn't so young as it turns out, but an upstart nonetheless, I guess.] > > > > Anyway, I hope Jason or others can do a better job than I did in communicating what I still think is an important--in fact, crucial point: that landscaping/gardening is a whole different paradigm from ecosystem restoration and management, and recognizing that crucial distinction is fundamental to a real understanding of the interplay between Nature and culture. > > > > I spent at least 15 years making the same fundamental mistake over and over again-using gardening/agronomic/landscaping practices in the attempt to restore/manage ecosystems. Failure after failure after failure, even though I had training in ecology and botany-and in gardening/agronomy/landscaping/landscape architecture. My fundamental error was letting the latter paradigm contaminate the former; I probably made the same mistake that remains common-thinking that they were synonymous. I could have not been more wrong-they are in fundamental opposition to each other. > > > > Not wanting to blather on and one with this post, I'll stop here for now . . . > > > > WT > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jason Hernandez"<[email protected]> > To:<[email protected]> > Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 5:08 PM > Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Conservation or just gardening? > > > This question is inspired by a conversation with a former employer. When do our interventions cease to be conservation and become gardening? > > For the sake of argument, I was taking the purist position: that ideally, we want to be able to put a fence around a natural area and walk away, letting nature manage it. But as my employer rightly pointed out, that is just not a realistic expectation in the 21st century, what with invasive species, systemic pollution, human pressures on surrounding areas, and countless other factors which will not go away. But of course, she also knew that there is a degree of intervention which crosses the line from conservation to gardening, that is, caring for a population that no longer participates in its ecosystem processes. > > There is, of course, a continuum of interventions. Removal of invasive competitors is a relatively light intervention; growing seedlings in a greenhouse and then planting them out is more intensive; maintaining an in vitro germplasm collection still more intensive. Are there any recognized criteria for determining the boundary between conservation and gardening? And if a species is beyond saving with conservation, how worthwhile is it to save that species with gardening? Can we determine when a species' only hope is gardening? > > Jason Hernandez > Biological Science Technician, USDA Forest Service > > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- > > > > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG - www.avg.com > Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3386 - Release Date: 01/17/11 07:34:00 -- Juan P Alvez PhD Candidate Rubenstein School of Environmental and Natural Resources Gund Institute for Ecological Economics University of Vermont 802-655-9739 "Me crié pastando cabras, no bien aprendí a caminar. Desde que nací mi mamá empezó a llevarme en su espalda y así crecí encima de ella escuchando sus coplas. Y mi padre cantaba acompañado por la guitarra. Por eso salí cantor." Tomas Lipan (Cantor Purmamarqueno de Jujuy) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3390 - Release Date: 01/19/11 07:34:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3392 - Release Date: 01/20/11 07:34:00
