Chapter 7: Opportunities

"The world's ecosystems respond to the aggregate of both anthropogenic and natural stresses on their well-being, but our attempts to protect them are fragmented and unduly reductionist."

John Cairns, Jr. (1991)

On a broad scale, a blend of management styles across the landscape will be needed to accommodate human and landscape needs over time and space. For instance, the intensity of management in wilderness is typically lower than in non-wilderness to enhance recreational experiences. Some areas will be managed more intensively for commodity production to meet landowners' management objectives and resource demands. In determining the appropriate blend of management regimes at the landscape level, managers must consider the dynamics of the entire landscape; forest ecosystem health can be achieved only within the context of ecosystem management. This philosophy requires managers to integrate the biophysical and human dimensions of the landscape and restore ecosystem structure and processes essential to its integrity and long-term sustainability. The "Forest Service Ethics and Course to the Future" (USDA Forest Service 1994b) states that the national forests and grasslands will be managed as models of ecosystem management.

Forest health must be a priority in developing management actions. One of the Forest Service's national priorities is to restore deteriorated ecosystems; the challenge is to translate national policy into on-the-ground management. Attempting to address all restoration needs is impossible. The continuing decline of personnel and budgets of land management agencies necessitates the setting of priorities of forest ecosystem health needs.

In establishing restoration priorities, both social concerns and ecological needs will need to be evaulated. Rather than exclusively targeting the most severely deteriorated ecosystems, it may be more cost-effective to focus restoration efforts on ecosystems that are at risk but only moderately degraded. Proactive management can head off further deterioration.

To make these determinations, the setting of forest health priorities must be an issue included in assessment efforts. One way this can be achieved within the Forest Service is through forest plans. Assessments of forest ecosystem health to support forest plan revision efforts should establish priorities for restoration needs for each forest. In addition, Ecosystem Management Areas (EMAs) at the landscape scale have been delineated for each forest in the Southwestern Region; the assessment of each EMA should include forest health priorities. Desired conditions for the EMAs developed in conjunction with each assessment should incorporate the concept of ecosystem health. Large area assessments at the regional or subregional scale are another opportunity to incorporate forest health needs into the planning process. Large area assessments provide the context for setting priorities at the forest plan level.

The assessment process includes the development of potential management practices that will incrementally move the landscape toward desired conditions for ecosystem health. Past and ongoing research studies and management restoration projects are invaluable in identifying innovative and practical techniques for reconstructing naturally functioning ecosystems. Several of the Region's ecosystem management demonstration projects have been partnerships efforts to restore pinyon–juniper ecosystems, e.g. the Carrizo Project on the Lincoln National Forest and the Flying V and H Project on the Tonto. Innovative pilot projects for road construction have led to a guidebook on managing roads for wet meadow ecosystem recovery (USDA Forest Service 1996b). Restoration studies in ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest are ongoing at the land unit scale near Flagstaff, Arizona and are being initiated at the landscape scale in the Mount Trumbell Resource Conservation Area north of the Grand Canyon (Covington et al. 1997). New information that results form these and other restoration project activities needs to be synthesised and made widely available to land managers.

Information management is another area rich in opportunities. Ecosystem and adaptive management require data appropriate to the issues of the area and at the appropriate scale. The Southwestern Region has not developed data requirements to support forest ecosystem health assessments. The Region should review data requirements to see if appropriate information related to ecosystem health is being collected at the appropriate spatial scales. Where possible, ties to national efforts should be made. Often, projects stall because the information identified in the information needs assessment process is unavailable. This is particularly true for projects requiring information on the historic conditions of an area. The amount and quality of information on historic conditions is highly variable, and historic documents and inventories have limited value for reconstructing landscape appearance prior to minimal human influence (Kaufmann et al.1994). [Technical editors note: They are of "limited value" because they rarely provide all the information required, but this limitation can be lessened by using many sites and sources and through use of models.] Although it is useful to expand research of historic conditions from agency records, libraries, and other sources, it is necessary to develop that understanding of historic conditions using information which can be obtained within the time frame of the planned assessment.

New technologies have become available in data collection, modeling, and information transfer. Remote sensing data are being acquired nationally to support Forest Service activities, and other agencies have typically made their data available over the Internet. GIS technology is already being used by most land management agencies, although the data available to support GIS analysis is often lacking. Decision support systems for modeling alternative scenarios are currently being developed; the Forest Service has identified approximately 20 systems used within the agency, e.g., Spectrum, RELM, SNAP, EMDS. To coordinate activities across ownership boundaries, efficient communication between different parties is essential. Using computers to communicate via the Internet, videoconferencing, and satellite conferencing are technologies readily available today, but they are often inadequately used.

Ecosystem management integrates both the human dimension and the biophysical aspects of the ecosystem. Although the Forest Service, or any other entity, has limited knowledge of the ecological processes in ecosystems, the agency's greater weakness is understanding the social context of an ecosystem assessment. In forest ecosystem health assessments, the values and uses of the communities of place, communities of interest, and the public should be characterized. Traditional and cultural perspectives should be included. The public should be involved in the assessment process; innovative techniques to keep the public informed, such as posting information on the Internet, should be explored. Partnerships with various agencies and groups to accomplish mutually beneficial forest ecosystem health objectives should be pursued. The ability to initiate restoration projects is dependent on the level of support for the project, both internally and externally. At all levels of the Region (Regional Office, forests, and districts), the Forest Service needs to implement collaborative stewardship by aggressively pursuing opportunities to communicate and collaborate among themselves and with the public about forest ecosystem health issues.

The adaptive management approach views management as a learning experience. Management actions must be coupled with monitoring to evaluate ecosystem responses. Projects must specifically state objectives to establish monitoring needs at the onset of the project, not as an afterthought. Projects should not be initiated unless monitoring needs can be met. In determining monitoring needs, three types of monitoring should be considered: 1) Did the project do what it said it would do (implementation)? 2) Did it work (effectiveness)? 3) Were the assumptions that were made valid (validation)? Validation monitoring is often, but not necessarily, the role of research. After monitoring takes place, the results need to be scientifically evaluated and applied to successive projects in a continuous feedback loop. Learning from monitoring and evaluation is an important aspect of adaptive management, but it is not the only one. In active adaptive management, management determines knowledge gaps and deliberately initiates management experiments to fill in those gaps to better understand the complexities of ecosystems. Since there is an infinite list of potential management experiments, ones should be selected where the consequences are meaningful enough to justify the cost. In deciding what changes to try, managers should look at the importance of the problem, not at the certainty of the answer; and they should be committed to going on to other potential solutions if the first one tried is a "surprise." Surprising results are legitimate, not signs of failure. Experimentation requires a clear understanding of scientific methodology. It involves the development of hypotheses and quantifiable objectives, designing a sampling scheme, establishing control areas, and setting rules for deciding when to adjust management. Results of management experiments need to be widely disseminated to avoid duplication of effort and extend use of new knowledge. Active adaptive management may result in different research techniques being used than have been used in the past. The ideal design of a management experiment may not be the most rigorous design possible, since it may be impractical to implement. The need for research scientists to be part of this approach is obvious; they can provide expertise and guidance on experimental design, the process used to collect and interpret data, and methods for monitoring ecosystem responses. Therefore, a close collaboration with research is essential, as well as more effective technology transfer between management and science.