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X-treme Ecology: How Extreme Events Can Expose Management Wrinkles

By Dr. Ignacio Porzecanski

The idea that we must properly manage habitats that have been ploughed up, urbanized, channelized, and generally transformed for centuries is growing. What does it mean to "manage properly"? This raises issues of objectives, sustainability, scientific evidence, and social learning. Traditionally, restoration efforts have focused on ways to re-establish conditions that promote the natural return of the original vegetation or habitat. Do we know enough to do this successfully? Sometimes we do, but it also depends upon the complexity of the actual environment at stake-the ecological dynamics of a degraded ecosystem can be very different from the dynamics of a pristine or less-impacted one, with many alternative states in between.

Sometimes, we do not know enough about the processes of change. Environmental forces can be extreme (floods, droughts, fires) and unexpected; and the social mechanisms that were put into place can be outmoded, outdated, or inoperative. In such cases, chaos can follow, "exposing management wrinkles" in the social-ecological system. In a best case scenario, this can lead to management structures being modified to effectively deal with the necessary changes.

What is a "management wrinkle"? It is a juncture where, in the evolution of a certain management regime, ecological and social forces jointly react to render it unable to cope with environmental changes. Two factors that complicate matters must be taken into account. The first one is that the rates of change of social organizations and of ecosystems under pressure are different. Organizations may change very slowly and with difficulty, while ecosystem change can be very quick, especially under extreme circumstances. The second one is that--whatever management or monitoring regime is in place--prediction of the nature and amount of likely change at a particular location is uncertain.

Examples abound. Extremes that come to mind immediately are New Orleans during Katrina and--in an increasingly ominous way--climate change. It could be said that what happens under the influence of extreme climatic episodes is the contraction of events from a leisurely time scale into a very short period, so that shock numbs our reactions and more time is needed for ecological and social readjustment to the new circumstances, if at all possible.

However, less drastic changes that act over large landscapes during longer periods can be equally catastrophic, such as algal blooms due to nutrient enrichment and overgrazing of natural pastures, with its consequent loss of plant biodiversity and soil erosion. Historically, wetlands were ignored, backward, and unappreciated for their rich wildlife. As they became transformed into an agricultural landscape, the land entered the realm of another management culture, where fertilizer practices, water allocations, and cultivation methods were paramount. The construction of dams, drainage channels, and irrigation infrastructures can have profound environmental effects. Thresholds are transgressed, flood and drought pulses disappear, vegetation growth and wildlife are disrupted. What began as a management wrinkle, with slow, gradual, but deep changes in the ecology of the landscape, becomes transformed into new policies put forward by new actors such as farmers, processing plants, wildlife defenders. It evolves into a new management regime.

It then becomes clear that coping with management wrinkles requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach for at least two reasons. It is unthinkable today to attempt to obtain knowledge about any complex ecosystem on a "piecemeal" basis, trying to tie results from hydrology to zoology (with limnology, botany, environmental law and many other disciplines in between). Even when coordinated or skillfully assembled these pieces of a puzzle remain painfully partial and uncertain.

We must attempt to identify--through experimentation--the universe of constraints that create internal feedbacks and that characterize threatened and degraded environments. Management actions that address multiple constraints simultaneously (e.g.: N-fertilizer application and runoff volumes; COČ emissions and sequestration) can be more successful than concentrating on one single constraint. In other words, we need to approach extreme events in a spirit of multidisciplinary experimentation as a learning process.

Dr. Porzecanski is currently involved in an NSF-funded IGERT titled Adaptive Management: Wise Use of Water, Wetlands, and Watersheds.

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