Adaptive management continues to move forward with support, criticism
Melinda Knutson, ISU doctoral alumni, lectured on her team’s efforts in the Northwest and Midwest regions of the United States. Knutson and her team work on the implementation of adaptive management within the National Wildlife Refuge Systems.
February 26, 2015
The Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, or NREM, hopes to educate on the advantages and dangers of adaptive management.
Melinda Knutson, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, received her Ph.D. from Iowa State in ecology and evolutionary biology, and came to speak to students about the process as a whole.
Knutson’s team is currently addressing “the biological monitoring and adaptive management needs of National Wildlife Refuges in the Midwest and regions in the Northeast.”
The term adaptive management, when applied to wildlife, refers to the process of hypothesizing how ecosystems work and recording the results in attempts to learn more about nature.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “we use resources of the world, but we do not understand nature well enough to know how to live harmoniously within environmental limits.”
Nature’s behavior can be uncertain and the USDA explains how adaptive management treats “human interventions in natural ecosystems as experimental probes.”
Adaptive management is a process of learning how an ecosystem functions and that knowledge can then be applied to conservation efforts.
The seminar, titled “Failure, Folly or the Future?” discussed the various issues that this process presents.
As Knutson explained, adaptive management’s primary goal is to gain knowledge to improve decision-making.
This technique faces some criticism. Although adaptive management can be used for conservation purposes, some believe interfering with the ecosystem at all is something to be avoided.
Sam Droege is a biologist who has spoken for a NREM seminar before and specializes in monitoring techniques.
“As a society, we spend a lot of money on monitoring,” Droege said in a recent seminar.
The monitoring of natural resources takes time and includes a learning process.
“It’s learning how to maintain sustainable ecosystems,” Knutson said.
Although it is far from perfect, adaptive management is a recent concept that continues to gain momentum as the process is fine-tuned.
Seminars through NREM can be found on the department’s website, along with a list of upcoming seminars, all of which take place at 3:10 p.m. in Lagomarcino Hall, room W142.
