David R. Marmorek

Insight into Enabling Adaptive Management

The U.S. National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry recognized a need for effective adaptive management to support management for biological diversity. However, difficulties in implementing adaptive management in the U.S. Northwest Forest Plan led the Commission to wonder if comparisons across multiple adaptive management trials in the forest sector could provide insight into the factors that serve to enable or inhibit adaptive management. This comparison and the resulting discussions among a group of seasoned practitioners, with adaptive management experience at a variety of scales and levels of complexity, led to insights into a hierarchy of ten factors that can serve to either enable or inhibit implementation. Doing high quality adaptive management is about doing good science to enable learning from management experience. Enabling adaptive management though is about working with people to understand their concerns, to develop a common understanding and an environment of trust that allows adaptive management to proceed. Careful attention to enabling factors is critical to fulfilling the promise of adaptive management.

Adaptive Management Today: A Practitioners’ Perspective

The practice of adaptive management reflects an evolution that has played out across the globe in a wide variety of resource management contexts. The current practice of adaptive management reflects a dynamic mix of valiant efforts, which as discussed in other chapters in this book includes both notable successes and dismal failures. In our three decades of experience with adaptive management we have learned significant lessons pointing the way toward improved and expanded practice. Notwithstanding the lessons learned by practitioners about how to do adaptive management well, we see a future with intensified social and institutional challenges inhibiting effective adaptive management, continued misunderstanding of what true adaptive management really is, and ever increasing environmental management challenges that cry out for rigorous adaptive management.

Collaborative Systemwide Monitoring and Evaluation Project (CSMEP) - Year 5 : Annual Report for FY 2008.

The Collaborative Systemwide Monitoring and Evaluation Project (CSMEP) is a coordinated effort to improve the quality, consistency, and focus of fish population and habitat data to answer key monitoring and evaluation questions relevant to major decisions in the Columbia River Basin. CSMEP was initiated by the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority (CBFWA) in October 2003. The project is funded by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) through the Northwest Power and Conservation Councils Fish and Wildlife Program (NPCC). CSMEP is a major effort of the federal state and Tribal fish and wildlife managers to develop regionally integrated monitoring and evaluation (ME (2) document, integrate, and make available existing monitoring data on listed salmon, steelhead, bull trout and other fish species of concern; (3) critically assess strengths and weaknesses of these data for answering key monitoring questions; and (4) collaboratively design, implement and evaluate improved M&E methods with other programmatic entities in the Pacific Northwest. During FY2008 CSMEP biologists continued their reviews of the strengths and weaknesses (S&W) of existing subbasin inventory data for addressing monitoring questions about population status and trends at different spatial and temporal scales. Work was focused on Lower Columbia Chinook and steelhead, Snake River fall Chinook, Upper Columbia Spring Chinook and steelhead, and Middle Columbia River Chinook and steelhead. These FY2008 data assessments and others assembled over the years of the CSMEP project can be accessed on the CBFWA public website. The CSMEP web database (http://csmep.streamnet.org/) houses metadata inventories from S&W assessments of Columbia River Basin watersheds that were completed prior to FY2008. These older S&W assessments are maintained by StreamNet, but budget cutbacks prevented us from adding the new FY2008 assessments into the database. Progress was made in FY2008 on CSMEPs goals of collaborative design of improved M&E methods. CSMEP convened two monitoring design workshops in Portland (December 5 and 6, 2007 and February 11 and 12, 2008) to continue exploration of how best to integrate the most robust features of existing M&E programs with new approaches. CSMEP continued to build on this information to develop improved designs and analytical tools for monitoring the status and trends of fish populations and the effectiveness of hatchery and hydrosystem recovery actions within the Columbia River Basin. CSMEP did not do any new work on habitat or harvest effectiveness monitoring designs in FY2008 due to budget cutbacks. CSMEP presented the results of the Snake Basin Pilot Study to the Independent Scientific Review Panel (ISRP) in Portland on December 7, 2008. This study is the finalization of CSMEPs pilot exercise of developing design alternatives across different M&E domains within the Snake River Basin spring/summer Chinook ESU. This work has been summarized in two linked reports (CSMEP 2007a and CSMEP 2007b). CSMEP participants presented many of the analyses developed for the Snake Basin Pilot work at the Western Division American Fisheries Society (AFS) conference in Portland on May 4 to 7, 2008. For the AFS conference CSMEP organized a symposium on regional monitoring and evaluation approaches. A presentation on CSMEPs Cost Integration Database Tool and Salmon Viability Monitoring Simulation Model developed for the Snake Basin Pilot Study was also given to the Pacific Northwest Aquatic monitoring Partnership (PNAMP) steering committee in Portland on August 28, 2008. Further information on CSMEP strengths and weaknesses assessments and monitoring design products for FY2008 is presented in the main text and appendices of this Annual Report as well as being available on CBFWAs public website.