AM for non-game species

A few years ago Mike Runge from the USGS used a series of the Adaptive Management Conference Series meetings to see if Decision Theoretic AM  could be applied to threatened and endangered species. That effort eventually lead to the development of the Structured Decision Making workshops and courses now regularly offered at the National Conservation Training Center. Although it has taken us a tremendously long time, the three case studies we started with are now up in a special issue at the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management. 

Here's the abstract from Mike Runge's introduction to the three papers:

Management of threatened and endangered species would seem to be a perfect context for adaptive management. Many of the decisions are recurrent and plagued by uncertainty, exactly the conditions that warrant an adaptive approach. But although the potential of adaptive management in these settings has been extolled, there are limited applications in practice. The impediments to practical implementation are manifold and include semantic confusion, institutional inertia, misperceptions about the suitability and utility, and a lack of guiding examples. In this special section of the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management, we hope to reinvigorate the appropriate application of adaptive management for threatened and endangered species by framing such management in a decision-analytical context, clarifying misperceptions, classifying the types of decisions that might be amenable to an adaptive approach, and providing three fully developed case studies. In this overview paper, I define terms, review the past application of adaptive management, challenge perceived hurdles, and set the stage for the case studies which follow.

I was a part of the Bull Trout team, the other two were Mead's Milkweed and Florida Scrub Jay.