Adaptive management is an approach to ecological management.

Adaptive environmental management is based upon the premise that managed ecosystems are complex and inherently unpredictable. Adaptive management accepts the uncertainty that exists in the real world rather than ignoring it. Consequently, adaptive management views management actions as experiments rather than solutions. Adaptive management is a structured process that reduces the costs of management experiments while increasing opportunities for social learning.

'Adaptive environmental assessment and management' was the original name given to this approach which was developed by the ecologists C.S. Holling and Carl J. Walters at the University of British Columbia, Canada in the 1970s. Adaptive management was further developed at IIASA in Vienna, Austria while C.S. Holling was director of the Institute. Adaptive management was initially applied in fishery management, but received more broad application in the 1990s, especially in forestry. Adaptive management has probably been most frequently applied in Australia and the Pacific Northwest of North America. Currently, many ecologists and resource managers now consider it to be the most scientific approach to ecosystem management.

Key features of adaptive management are:

• Linking management to appropriate temporal and spatial scales
• Focusing management on statistical power and experimental controls
• Using computer simulation to build a shared synthetic understanding of the managed ecosystem
• Using this shared understanding to evaluate and create strategic management alternatives
• Enabling political negotiation by creating novel and evocative policy alternatives

In the early 21st century, Fikret Berkes , Carl Folke , Johan Colding and collaborators have developed more collaborative approaches to adaptive management that they call adaptive co-management .

Key References

Berkes, F., J. Colding and C. Folke, editors. 2002. Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Holling, C. S., editor. 1978. Adaptive environmental assessment and management. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., Chichester.

Lee, K. N. 1993. Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Walters, C. J. 1986. Adaptive management of renewable resources. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, New York.

See Also

• Conservation ecology
• Ecology
• Fisheries
• Forestry