Adaptive Management - Use in Environmental Practices

Use in Environmental Practices

Applying adaptive management in a conservation project or program involves the integration of project/program design, management, and monitoring to systematically test assumptions in order to adapt and learn. The three components of adaptive management in environmental practice are:

• Testing Assumptions is about systematically trying different actions to achieve a desired outcome. It is not, however, a random trial-and-error process. Rather, it involves using knowledge about the specific site to pick the best known strategy, laying out the assumptions behind how that strategy will work, and then collecting monitoring data to determine if the assumptions hold true.

• Adaptation involves changing assumptions and interventions to respond to new or different information obtained through monitoring and project experience.

• Learning is about explicitly documenting a team’s planning and implementation processes and its successes and failures for internal learning as well as learning across the conservation community. This learning enables conservation practitioners to design and manage projects better and avoid some of the perils others have encountered (Stankey et al. 2005).Learning about a managed system is only useful in cases where management decisions are repeated (Rout et al. 2009).