Monday, September 14, 2009
AM for parks and uncertainty vs. risk
Tony Prato is an economist at the University of Missouri-Columbia who works on Adaptive Management. Last summer he published an article in Park Science on applying AM to a management question in a national park. What is particularly interesting to me is his distinction between risk and uncertainty - a distinction often made by social scientists but rarely if ever made by ecologists. It was also interesting to see how he deals with the uncertainty case. Although he set out to argue that experimental manipulations of management actions are highly desirable, his example glossed over the experimental part completely.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Another interesting comment from Prato (2005) where his analysis of four different management approaches show adaptive management ranked as the most scientifically superior approach, it was penalized for being costly and time consuming. Fair enough. But, additionally, the adaptive management framework was not compatible with the US National Environmental Policy Act "because adaptive management selects the best decision alternative based on experimental results rather than selecting a particular management alternative in advance of implementation." I'm not sure what definition of adaptive management Prato is referring to, but perhaps a look at NEPA's policy would be helpful. From the one sentence description, the two sound similar.
ReplyDelete