Implementing adaptive management through the North Coast LRMP

Summary

Ecological and social systems are complex, dynamic and inherently unpredictable. It can be extremely difficult to predict what will happen if we follow a certain pathway, or which of several possible pathways will lead us to our goal. Developing an LRMP is particularly challenging because we are dealing with a large landbase, multiple objectives (values), and a wide variety of management activities. […]

This background report provides some ideas and suggestions for how adaptive management (and active adaptive management in particular) could be incorporated into the LRMP from the outset. It is intended to provide the government technical team with a foundation on which to build a more specific and detailed adaptive management framework for the North Coast LRMP. The report addresses five specific questions about how to incorporate adaptive management into the LRMP:

• What are the criteria to assess the resources/values that would benefit from adaptive management? I.e., How do we identify situations where uncertainty masks our ability to make good decisions?
• How might the planning table approach its negotiations within an adaptive management framework?
• How can the LRMP provide language through objectives and strategies to identify and enable testing of resource management assumptions?
• What are the criteria for identifying indicators to test resource management assumptions?
• What types of analysis would support an Adaptive Management approach? How should these analyses be incorporated into a decision support system for the process?

–Excerpt from the report’s Introduction