Each restoration project has its own uncertainties and surprises, and each requires flexibility. Adaptive management is a way to remain flexible and cope with surprises while making necessary management decisions. It is an approach to ecosystem restoration that recognizes uncertainties, embraces multiple problem-solving strategies, and allows for adjustments to be made along the way. By combining research and active management, adaptive management allows the lessons from current work to be applied to future projects.

Adaptive management centers on the six-step process detailed here.

1. Assess

The adaptive management process begins with an assessment of the problem. It may be beneficial to work in a collaborative effort with multiple stakeholders to address these questions:

• What are the project objectives?

  Objectives can be large-scale or small, focused on biological processes or on socio-political issues. Specific restoration objectives might include: fuels reduction, restoring natural ecosystem functions, improving recreational opportunities, or restoring habitat for particular plants or animals.

• What methods might achieve these objectives?

  Adaptive management is about taking risks and exploring alternate hypotheses, so it may be a good idea to try and compare various methods (such as thinning and burning, or burning without thinning) in order to learn what works and what doesn’t in your particular project area.

• What predictions can be made about possible outcomes?

  Making predictions about likely treatment outcomes is a vital step in learning. For example, we might predict that a treatment of thinning and prescribed burning will promote the growth of understory plants. If later monitoring reveals high levels of noxious, invasive species, though, future treatments might have to be modified to prevent their spread.

• How will outcomes be measured?

  Identifying appropriate indicators, as well as establishing effective monitoring and evaluation strategies, is essential to a successful adaptive management project.

• What uncertainties exist?

  During the initial stages of a project, uncertainties may seem infinite; however, they can be minimized by distinguishing between nice-to-know facts and need-to-know facts. For example, it might be nice to know the historic composition of grasses and shrubs in a restoration area, but this information is unlikely to be vital in shaping treatments. On the other hand, knowing how different treatments might affect fire behavior may be critical.

2. Design

Keep in mind that adaptive management is about learning, so design treatments to allow comparisons between various treatment types, such as thinning-only, thinning and burning, and no treatment. These comparisons may help resolve some of the key uncertainties identified in step 1. To learn more about various treatment types and experimental designs implemented in the Southwest, visit the Treatments and Research pages.

3. Implement

Implement treatments according to plan. Keeping up-to-date and accurate records is vital. Any deviations from the original treatment design must be recorded, as they will affect steps 4 and 5: monitoring and evaluation.

4. Monitor

Monitoring is vital in assessing restoration progress and shaping future treatments. Monitoring of the same indicators in the face of different prescriptions can help shape future restoration efforts. Many monitoring protocols have been standardized to allow comparisons between sites where similar treatments have been implemented. Though a virtually endless array of ecological and social quantities could be measured, research is often most effective when a small numbers of ecosystem indicators are measured within many restoration sites, as opposed to monitoring many indicators at a few sites.

5. Evaluate

Ideally, monitoring of restoration progress should be ongoing, but once some results are available it is a good time to compare actual results with the projected objectives identified in step 1. This evaluation will help shape the next series of treatments.

6. Adjust

The final step is what makes adaptive management so useful in ecological restoration. Evaluation results allow managers and researchers to adjust treatments, prescriptions, plans, and policies. If some uncertainties identified in step 1 were not resolved, this is the time to redesign treatments based on these new findings.