Conservation biology: key concepts and applications

Ecosystems / Invasive Species

The Ecosystem Approach to Management (EAM) follows ten basic principles. The first is hierarchical context, which insists on examining biodiversity at ever level within the ecosystem under management. Next is attention to ecological boundaries, with the awareness that many ecosystems are additionally affected by political boundaries that may hinder the attempt to regard the ecosystem as a whole. The third principle is a kind of corollary to this, emphasizing a regard for ecological integrity, namely to regard any given ecosystem as an extremely complex whole, which is capable of responding in unpredictable ways to external stressors. The fourth principle is arguably the most important for land management, and this is the adaptive approach to management: this means that, given the complexity of ecosystems, any management approach should be regarded as an ongoing experiment that monitors its ongoing data and can flexibly change approach at any point. Fifth, which is crucial for public land management, is actor cooperation, which insists on joint planning with the involvement of all key stakeholders. The sixth principle emphasizes organizational change (so as to increase involvement in the effort) and the seventh regards human beings as fundamentally being part of the natural ecosystem, placed within it, and not an invasive force. The eighth and ninth principles emphasize data collection and consistent monitoring of the ongoing efforts (both of which refer back to the adaptive approach of the fourth principle). And finally the tenth principle involves respecting and incorporating the values of all the competing stakeholders, with an emphasis again on flexibility.

The basic principles of the Ecosystem Approach to Management combine to form the kind of managerial style which is described in the fourth principle: the "adaptive" approach to management, which emphasizes flexibility, experiment, continuous response to stimuli, and non-stop ad hoc solution-seeking. To suggest that this form of management is generally not practiced by government agencies should be apparent to anyone who has ever filled out a tax return for the IRS or waited in line at the DMV: government bureaucracies are fond of fixed regulations, and the notion of a managerial style which is willing to change those regulations in response to ongoing trends in the data being collected is not the most obvious form of management style to be practiced by government employees.

In 2004, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented an Ecosystems Approach to Management for the entire agency. However it was clear that in many ways, the old-style governmental approach might be a hindrance to the full implementation of EAM. For example, the NOAA was responsible for assisting with enforcement of federal legislation called the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and Protection Act, which contained specific language regarding the protection of the critically threatened coral species in that region. Yet the Ecosystems approach backs away from the old custodial emphasis on maintaining and nursing specific species to ask the larger questions about the ecosystem that are endangering those species. Ultimately the EAM made greater sense, because coral reefs are themselves a distinct ecosystem, and thus monitoring the health of the coral population entails monitoring the health of all the other species that comprise the reef-based ecosystem. Nevertheless, it is a conceptual change from government-sponsored conservation efforts of the past, which might have focused specifically in the same region on the manatee population, and thus played a pure game of numbers. To regard the Florida manatee instead as part of a larger ecosystem that must be monitored in numerous different ways requires a change in approach which is not always easy for a government agency to implement.