walters-1986.html

Walters, C. J. (1986). Adaptive management of renewable resources. New York, Macmillan.

pg vii - "My major conclusion is that actively adaptive, probing, deliberately experimental policies should indeed be a basic part of renewable resource management."

pg 1 - "Man has proved remarkably adept at developing harvests from potentially renewable natural resources, such as fish, wildlife, and forests. But he has shown considerably less skill in devising schemes for sustaining the harvests over long periods of time."

until just a little while ago (50 years) resource use was a boom followed by collapse

pg 2 - two fundamental flaws in resource sciences

first flaw -

"research and management have concentrated primarily on biological/ecological and technical harvesting issues, with only token consideration to the socioeconomic dynamics that are never completely controlled by management activities."

second flaw -

strategic question of how to develop a better understanding of the systems we manage

given that we have great uncertainty, limited research and continuing pressure

traditional answer is that we just do more monitoring and research

"better" means more detailed

how are the components going to be put together - at larger scales

how can we make enough observations

we need to "seek a fundamentally different approach to scientific management"

pg 3 - epistemology - "Does Understanding Accumulate?"

basic assumption in biology is that knowledge and understanding accumulates

questioned by Kuhn's work - that knowledge builds up until a paradigm shift

how to use increasing information effectively

develop and test simulation models

in many cases found that there were major uncertainties about the economic/ecological processes

their effect only seen on longer time scale or bigger spatial scale

these uncertainties were not being investigated actively

pg 7 example of adaptive management idea

major uncertainty about the number of salmon that spawn and whether more salmon leads to more spawning or a repression (i.e. through competition)

adaptive management - let more salmon spawn and see what happens

objections on two levels

fishermen would object and they would loose confidence in management

the belief that uncertainty can be resolved without disturbing current balance

pg 8&9- major issues of adaptive management

it is a "continual learning processe that cannot conveniently be separated into functions like "research", and "ongoing regulatory activities," and probably never converges to a state of blissful equilibrium involving full knowledge and optimum productivity."

<!--- the basic issues are like problem solving processes -->

1. bounding of the problem, identifying explicit and implicit objectives

2. representation of the problem through models that spell out the assumptions and predictions clearly enough to be tested

3. representation of the uncertainty and its propagation through the system, identifying alternative hypotheses

4. design of policies that management resource while probing behavior of the system