I came across this post comparing two prominent reactions to how models should be used in policy when browsing posts from September 2009. Nothing new to add, except that I don't call it the "North American School" of AM anymore, but rather the "Resilience-Experimentalist School". Jamie McFadden wrote the paper on that!
And Spotify has a soundtrack for looking back. Way back!
Showing posts with label resilience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resilience. Show all posts
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Schooling one's thoughts
Quite a while back Jim Peterson (now at Oregon State), started me thinking about similarities and differences between approaches to Adaptive Management. One of my students, Jamie McFadden, took on this idea and conducted a small review of published AM studies, which is now available as "Evaluating the Efficacy of Adaptive Management Approaches: Is There a Formula For Success?". In it, Jamie outlines the attributes of AM projects that fall into two camps: the Experimental Resilience camp and the Decision-Theoretic camp. Jamie found that projects in the DT camp were steadily increasing in number, and that they tended to reach a higher level of success - as she defined it. I hope this article stimulates some broader conversation about what AM is and isn't, how to measure success, and how we can continue to improve - I believe it is time to "Adaptively Manage" Adaptive Management.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Costs of flood control
Rebecca Wodder, president of American Rivers, wrote an interesting piece in this weeks PrairieFire on the rising costs of flood control, and what some communities are doing about it. I don't know where she got her numbers from, but even after spending $123 billion in inflation adjusted federal tax dollars over the last 50 years, the annual cost of flood damage continues to rise at 2.9% per year. That's a stunning set of numbers. Forget fish habitat! Here are real costs - and we don't know how fast they will continue to rise - or what the precise effects of future climate change will be. Why do people keep building on floodplains!
Unbounded uncertainty. Levees and other engineering structures work as long as the system doesn't exceed expectations - expectations that are based on the "period of record".
Unbounded uncertainty. Levees and other engineering structures work as long as the system doesn't exceed expectations - expectations that are based on the "period of record".
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Answering the dinner lady
I've been sitting in on a meeting of the Adaptive Management Working Group of the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program - they are discussing the objectives and design of the "flow piece" - the experiment to test the effects of environmental flows on the Central Platte Ecosystem. I've met with these folks before, and its a vibrant and passionately interested group of folks from many different state and federal agencies. We spent the day debating the nature of the experiment, in particular what the main objective is.
But that's not what I wanted to write about - we also had dinner at a local restaurant (Front Street Steakhouse, Ogallala - they even had a pretty good vegie burger, but get the extra mushrooms and onions) - 20 odd biologists, hydrologists and engineers descended on this fine local establishment for an excellent meal and good conversation. As the last few of us were paying our bills, the woman behind the till, asked us "What are you doing with our River?". I promptly passed the buck to Chad Smith - after all, I'm merely a consultant! Chad gave a pretty good short answer - something about planning for environmental restoration - but that wasn't quite enough for her. She had two things on her mind - getting jobs in Ogallala ("Why aren't you doing it NOW") and getting the river back from the "Hunters from Cabela's" into the hands of the farmers. At the time I wasn't quite sure what to make of that last comment about the hunters, but now I think it was her label for people that want the river to do something other than provide irrigation water.
This is the essential tradeoff - water left to go down the river is water that farmers can't use for irrigation, and hence a reduced economic output for the region. Worse, the environmental restoration will not provide the jobs that the dinner lady wanted. The program has lots of money, but much of it is going to people like me - high priced consultants to help design and monitor the restoration. Much also goes to purchasing land, paying taxes and so forth, but relatively little is going to get directly into the economy of Ogallala. I don't think the full story would make the dinner lady very happy at all.
This idea that water not used is wasted isn't limited to Ogallala. I wasn't able to attend the "Future of water for food" conference held this week in my office building, but one of my colleagues that did quoted a speaker there - "water that reaches the sea is water wasted". That's a pretty radical point of view! But as an ecologist, how do I rebut that view? And, will the dinner lady ever accept my answer?
But that's not what I wanted to write about - we also had dinner at a local restaurant (Front Street Steakhouse, Ogallala - they even had a pretty good vegie burger, but get the extra mushrooms and onions) - 20 odd biologists, hydrologists and engineers descended on this fine local establishment for an excellent meal and good conversation. As the last few of us were paying our bills, the woman behind the till, asked us "What are you doing with our River?". I promptly passed the buck to Chad Smith - after all, I'm merely a consultant! Chad gave a pretty good short answer - something about planning for environmental restoration - but that wasn't quite enough for her. She had two things on her mind - getting jobs in Ogallala ("Why aren't you doing it NOW") and getting the river back from the "Hunters from Cabela's" into the hands of the farmers. At the time I wasn't quite sure what to make of that last comment about the hunters, but now I think it was her label for people that want the river to do something other than provide irrigation water.
This is the essential tradeoff - water left to go down the river is water that farmers can't use for irrigation, and hence a reduced economic output for the region. Worse, the environmental restoration will not provide the jobs that the dinner lady wanted. The program has lots of money, but much of it is going to people like me - high priced consultants to help design and monitor the restoration. Much also goes to purchasing land, paying taxes and so forth, but relatively little is going to get directly into the economy of Ogallala. I don't think the full story would make the dinner lady very happy at all.
This idea that water not used is wasted isn't limited to Ogallala. I wasn't able to attend the "Future of water for food" conference held this week in my office building, but one of my colleagues that did quoted a speaker there - "water that reaches the sea is water wasted". That's a pretty radical point of view! But as an ecologist, how do I rebut that view? And, will the dinner lady ever accept my answer?
Monday, April 27, 2009
Shifting Baselines and why we train grad students
GuiltyPlanet posted some great fish pictures from an article "in press" at Conservation Biology by Loren McClenachan. The upshot - the Florida Keys are stuffed - sport fish are smaller and species composition has shifted since the 1950's. Surprise, suprise. I wonder why no one has tried something similar with game birds - plenty of historical pix from the 19th century and early 20th centuries of people with dozens of birds from a morning's hunting. I suppose the main quantifiable thing about the fish pictures is the size, and that doesn't shift with game birds (AFAIK). So ... relevance to AM ... hmmm. Well - just makes it clear that you can't rely on the experience of the local expert pool to set the objectives!
For a long time - since I started writing grants to fund myself as a PhD student and later as a postdoc - I've believed that the primary reason Universities push graduate education so hard is economic. Graduate students are cheap, highly motivated labor, both for teaching and research. Mark Taylor wrote a nice Op-Ed piece in the New York Times last week where he made exactly that point - from the perspective of a professor of religious studies. He also made some pretty radical suggestions for how to reform the University system. Now I don't necessarily agree with every point he made there, but the one about graduate training emphasizing "cloning" is highly relevant. One of the big struggles facing the implementation of AM is a lack of people that have the right kind of background. Training as a research ecologist does not prepare you to help managers do Adaptive Management. Training as a wildlife biologist does not prepare you to use AM in making decisions - in fact, we avoid teaching ecologists about decision making altogether. We (the denizens of the 4th floor of Hardin Hall) have put together a graduate specialization in AM, but this only solves half the problem.
The other half of the problem - well, maybe the other 90% of the problem - is that graduate education for wildlife biologists in North America is largely funded by RESEARCH grants. So - how do you write a grant to fund someone who is going to learn how to do AM? Sure, they can work on a project to develop an AM plan, but it is going to take alot longer to develop than say, counting birds on a bunch of conservation easements before and after woody veg removal. The latter is relatively easy for a state agency to fund ("relatively" is an important word here!), whereas the AM plan is much harder, because it looks expensive and there is a long lag time before a student can start to really get the work done. And where's the research component? If you want to do research on developing the tools of AM - quantitative methods, stakeholder interactions, etc - great, but then you really have alot of learning to do before you can be effective. Who pays for you to develop the skills needed to even begin doing that research?
Sorry, no answers on that front. I'm open to suggestions for how to pay for graduate education that is relevant to professionals in the field.
For a long time - since I started writing grants to fund myself as a PhD student and later as a postdoc - I've believed that the primary reason Universities push graduate education so hard is economic. Graduate students are cheap, highly motivated labor, both for teaching and research. Mark Taylor wrote a nice Op-Ed piece in the New York Times last week where he made exactly that point - from the perspective of a professor of religious studies. He also made some pretty radical suggestions for how to reform the University system. Now I don't necessarily agree with every point he made there, but the one about graduate training emphasizing "cloning" is highly relevant. One of the big struggles facing the implementation of AM is a lack of people that have the right kind of background. Training as a research ecologist does not prepare you to help managers do Adaptive Management. Training as a wildlife biologist does not prepare you to use AM in making decisions - in fact, we avoid teaching ecologists about decision making altogether. We (the denizens of the 4th floor of Hardin Hall) have put together a graduate specialization in AM, but this only solves half the problem.
The other half of the problem - well, maybe the other 90% of the problem - is that graduate education for wildlife biologists in North America is largely funded by RESEARCH grants. So - how do you write a grant to fund someone who is going to learn how to do AM? Sure, they can work on a project to develop an AM plan, but it is going to take alot longer to develop than say, counting birds on a bunch of conservation easements before and after woody veg removal. The latter is relatively easy for a state agency to fund ("relatively" is an important word here!), whereas the AM plan is much harder, because it looks expensive and there is a long lag time before a student can start to really get the work done. And where's the research component? If you want to do research on developing the tools of AM - quantitative methods, stakeholder interactions, etc - great, but then you really have alot of learning to do before you can be effective. Who pays for you to develop the skills needed to even begin doing that research?
Sorry, no answers on that front. I'm open to suggestions for how to pay for graduate education that is relevant to professionals in the field.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Corn! and NEPA
While browsing other science blogs I came across a great one about insects and ... well, insects. And one of Bug_girl's reviews was of a recent article predicting impacts of corn for biofuel on ecosystem services - my only thought was "Wow - did congress have to do an EIS before they passed that law?" - they should have! When does a law become a "federal action" that requires compliance with NEPA?
One of the conclusions of that article is that decreasing diversity decreases ecosystem function. I came across another article on the diversity-function debate in last week's Nature. The authors set up > 1000 microbial communities, each with the same suite of 18 taxa of denitrifying bacteria. The key was that the communities varied in "evenness" - the extent to which the community is dominated by one or a few species. They then challenged each micro-community with a dose of nitrite, and then measured how much of the nitrite was removed 20 hours later. Communities with greater evenness performed better - and more importantly, maintained that improved performance to a greater extent when the microcosm was simulataneously challenged with increased salinity.
So, is this resilience sensu Holling and Gunderson? I think not, for a couple of reasons. First, although the functional rate decreases with decreasing evenness, all the microcosms still function to some extent; there is no "flip" to an alternative non-functioning state. The appearance of a non-linear threshold would be the ultimate cool result, but they found only smooth changes. Second, they did not examine the structure of the microbial community AFTER the perturbation. Resilience posits that resilient systems will maintain their structure during and after a perturbation - structure in this case would refer to the relative abundance of the 18 microbial taxa. It is possible that even the control communities that were not challenged would have shifted in relative abundance just because of normal competition between the microbes.
Regardless, it is a really cool experiment!
Full citations:
Douglas A. Landis, Mary M. Gardiner, Wopke van der Werf and Scott M. Swinton. 2008. Increasing corn for biofuel production reduces biocontrol services in agricultural landscapes. PNAS 105(51) 20552-20557
One of the conclusions of that article is that decreasing diversity decreases ecosystem function. I came across another article on the diversity-function debate in last week's Nature. The authors set up > 1000 microbial communities, each with the same suite of 18 taxa of denitrifying bacteria. The key was that the communities varied in "evenness" - the extent to which the community is dominated by one or a few species. They then challenged each micro-community with a dose of nitrite, and then measured how much of the nitrite was removed 20 hours later. Communities with greater evenness performed better - and more importantly, maintained that improved performance to a greater extent when the microcosm was simulataneously challenged with increased salinity.
So, is this resilience sensu Holling and Gunderson? I think not, for a couple of reasons. First, although the functional rate decreases with decreasing evenness, all the microcosms still function to some extent; there is no "flip" to an alternative non-functioning state. The appearance of a non-linear threshold would be the ultimate cool result, but they found only smooth changes. Second, they did not examine the structure of the microbial community AFTER the perturbation. Resilience posits that resilient systems will maintain their structure during and after a perturbation - structure in this case would refer to the relative abundance of the 18 microbial taxa. It is possible that even the control communities that were not challenged would have shifted in relative abundance just because of normal competition between the microbes.
Regardless, it is a really cool experiment!
Full citations:
Douglas A. Landis, Mary M. Gardiner, Wopke van der Werf and Scott M. Swinton. 2008. Increasing corn for biofuel production reduces biocontrol services in agricultural landscapes. PNAS 105(51) 20552-20557
Lieven Wittebolle, Massimo Marzorati, Lieven Clement, Annalisa Balloi, Daniele Daffonchio, Kim Heylen, Paul De Vos, Willy Verstraete & Nico Boon. 2009. Initial community evenness favours functionality under selective stress. Nature 458:623-627. doi:10.1038/nature07840
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