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Developing Landscape-Scale Information to Meet Ecological, Economic, and Social Needs
William P. Gregg, Jr.
There is a growing consensus among managers and the public that natural resources should be managed according to principles of sustainability. Management practices must be ecologically sound, economically feasible, and socially and politically acceptable (Salwasser et al. 1992). Ecosystems are increasingly seen as fundamental units of interaction between people and Nature. Management goals must be holistic. They must reflect clear vision of the desired condition of the land to maintain aesthetics, soil processes, water quality and availability, atmospheric composition, native biological diversity, and areas of special sensitivity to disturbance. They must also reflect a clear vision for maintaining the health, economic prosperity, cultural diversity, and social well-being of the human communities of today and tomorrow. In addition, management practices to implement these goals must take into account the many uncertainties that affect natural and human systems, and the interacting effects of local decisions and regional and global conditions and trends. They must be based on an ethic of cooperation, in which people are seen as partners in planning and decision-making.
Ecosystem management is a process for implementing principles of sustainability. The process can apply to any geographic area where integrated approaches to achieve desired ecological conditions are practicable. However, ecosystem management most often applies to large geographic areas, which have been referred to as greater ecosystems (Grumbine 1990, Clark and Zaunbrecher 1987), regional ecosystems (Keystone Center 1991), regional landscapes (Noss 1983), and biogeocultural regions (U.S. MAB 1989). Although there is substantial recent literature on ecosystem management, a detailed definition has not yet become widely accepted. However, the following characteristics are frequently mentioned (Clark and Harvey 1988, Grumbine 1990, Noss 1990, 1992, Salwasser et al. 1992). Ecosystem management areas are typically open-ended. They are large enough to maintain viable populations of native species, including wide-ranging mammals. They accommodate natural disturbance regimes—that is, they can be expected to enable the long-term survival of native species under expected frequencies and intensities of fire, drought, temperature extremes, outbreaks of pests and diseases, and other stochastic events. Human use and occupancy occur at levels that do not cause ecological degradation. Management has a long time horizon, on the order of decades to centuries, that facilitates natural evolution of ecosystems and species. All organisms benefit from the management process. Charismatic, commercial, and other special-status species are considered in the context of the total management program. People are considered an integral part of the ecosystem. Management reflects understanding of the interactions of natural and human systems at many spatial and temporal scales.
Ecosystem management reflects and fosters an ethic of sustainability, and requires continuing consultation and cooperation among landowners and other stakeholders. As the number of stakeholders increases, the process becomes more effective in facilitating the complex tradeoffs that enable use of ecosystems to meet human needs in ways that sustain natural ecosystem functions and components in a changing environment.
Ecosystem management requires the creative balancing of four general types of needs:
- Material and energy needs refer to the use of ecosystems to produce materials, commodities, and energy required for human survival or that contribute to the material advancement of human societies. Timber production areas, croplands, subsistence use areas, water development projects, and mineral and energy development projects serve primarily these needs.
- Social needs refer to the use of ecosystems to provide the context for the social interactions of individuals and communities. Human settlements, recreation areas, and cultural landscapes exemplify uses that serve primarily social needs.
- Spiritual needs refer to uses that facilitate the aesthetic, meditative, symbolic or religious experience of individuals or cultural groups. Nature preserves, national parks, wilderness areas, religious sites, and areas of traditional cultural importance serve primarily these types of needs.
- Informational needs refer to uses that provide the knowledge and skills that support the theory and practice of ecosystem management through research, education, training, and demonstration. Biosphere reserves, long-term ecological research sites, and experimental forests exemplify areas where developing, sharing, and applying information are especially important.
Diverse, highly focused, and well-established constituencies of public agencies and private sector organizations facilitate, promote, or implement use and management of resources to meet material and energy needs (e.g., forest products and energy development industries), social needs (e.g., sporting associations, community organizations), and spiritual needs (e.g., wilderness and nature conservation organizations). However, constituencies for use and management of ecosystems to meet informational needs remain embryonic. Government agencies and academic institutions have established hundreds of research sites, and have identified numerous areas for obtaining information on natural and managed ecosystems to address particular management issues and research questions. However, only a few government programs (e.g., U.S. Man and the Biosphere Program, National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research Areas) and professional organizations (e.g., Association of Ecological Research Areas, Ecological Society of America’s Sustainable Biosphere Initiative) actively promote and facilitate broad, interdisciplinary scientific uses of ecosystems that contribute to ecosystem management.
Existing landscape patterns reflect the interactions of particular governmental agencies responsible for regulating and managing uses relating to the needs of particular constituencies. Although the types and patterns of uses currently being established in many regions are becoming less effective in sustaining economic productivity and ecosystem functions, natural resource managers have found it difficult to achieve a broad acceptance of goals and practices to facilitate beneficial changes. An underlying problem is the lack of a sufficiently broad public understanding and ownership of the information used to formulate new goals and management practices. Although cooperation in developing information for ecosystem management is increasing, public constituencies for these activities have only recently begun to emerge. Yet, these constituencies will be essential for significant progress in implementing ecosystem management. In the complex political environments of many jurisdictions and competing interests that comprise the constituencies for ecosystem management, good information, widely shared, broadly understood, and generally accepted will be the most important enabling factor in the ecosystem management process.
Scientists and managers have a mutual interest in identifying representative ecological areas where long-term cooperative programs will be organized and implemented to develop the theory and practice of ecosystem management. The four case-study regions examined in the following chapters exemplify “landscapes for learning” where efforts have been initiated to build constituencies for such programs. Remote sensing and geographic information systems are basic technological tools in these programs. They offer the means for obtaining and organizing a large volume of scientific data, and a way to encourage consideration of ecosystems and landscapes as information resources. The technologies are becoming increasingly important in assessing the status of ecosystems and biological diversity (Scott et al. 1993). They are facilitating understanding and modeling of the temporal and spatial relationships among natural forces and human activities in creating contemporary landscapes, and thus improving the informational basis for establishing goals and strategies for managing these interactions. They offer managers useful tools in resolving conflicts among competing interests by strengthening common understanding of ecosystem conditions and trends. By facilitating communication among the stakeholders in ecosystem management, they can help reveal whether conflicts are due to lack of information or to differences in valuation of natural resources, and can play a catalytic role in developing the new cooperative mechanisms that will be needed to implement ecosystem management.
Addressing issues of scale is one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary ecology (Wiens 1992). Through cooperative programs that support ecosystem management, remote sensing and GIS technologies can help ecologists develop and test hypotheses regarding the effects of scale on ecological relationships and processes. They can link understanding of ecological processes and mechanisms from site-specific and organismal studies with ecosystem models at many scales, and can apply this knowledge in discovering and assessing possibilities for adaptively managing ecosystems and biological diversity in response to regional and global change.
Biological diversity, sustainable ecological systems, and global change are likely to be the greatest management challenges in the next century. These interrelated issues are the priorities of contemporary ecosystem science (Lubchenco et al. 1991, Huntley et al. 1992) and the focus of domestic and international cooperation to improve the scientific basis for ecosystem management (Comanor and Gregg 1993, UNESCO 1993). By bringing together resource managers, ecologists, and specialists in remote sensing and GIS technologies from four large ecological regions of North America, the chapters that follow set a precedent for the broader exchange of experience that will be required to implement the goal of a sustainable biosphere.
References
Clark, T.W., and A.H. Harvey. 1988. Management of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: an annotated bibliography. Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, Jackson Hole, Wyo. 51 pp.
Clark, T.W., and D. Zaunbrecher. 1987. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: The ecosystem concept in natural resource policy and management. Renewable Resources Journal 5(3):8–16.
Comanor, P., and W.P. Gregg. 1993. Global change research in U.S. National Parks. George Wright Forum 9(3–4):67–74.
Grumbine, E. 1990. Protecting biological diversity through the greater ecosystem concept. Natural Areas Journal 10(3):114–120.
Huntley, B.J., et al. 1992. The sustainable biosphere: The global imperative. Ecology International 20:5–15.
Keystone Center. 1991. Biological diversity on federal lands: Report of a Keystone policy dialogue. The Keystone Center, Keystone, Colo. 96 pp.
Lubchenco, J., et al. 1991. The Sustainable Biosphere Initiative: An ecological research agenda. Ecology 72(2):371–412.
Noss, R.F 1983. A regional landscape approach to maintain diversity. BioScience 33:700–706.
Noss, R.F. 1990. Issues of scale in conservation biology. In: PL. Fiedler and S.K. Jain (eds.). Conservation biology: The theory and practice of nature conservation, preservation, and management. Chapman and Hall.
Noss, R.F. 1992. The Wildland Project: Plotting a North American wilderness recovery strategy. Wild Earth (Special Issue). Cenozoic Society, Inc., Canton, N.Y. 88 pp.
Salwasser, H., D.W. MacCleery, and T. Snellgrove. 1992. A perspective on people, wood, and environment in U.S. forest stewardship. George Wright Forum 8(4):21–43.
Scott, J.M., et al. 1993. Gap analysis: A geographic approach to protection of biological diversity. Wildlife Monographs 123:1–41.
UNESCO. 1993. MAB International Coordinating Council, 12th Session, 25–29 January 1993. Draft report. 19 pp.
U.S. MAB Directorate on Biosphere Reserves. 1989. Guidelines for the selection and management of biosphere reserves (draft). Available from U.S. MAB Secretariat, Department of State, Washington, D.C.
Wiens, J.A. 1992. Ecology 2000: An essay on future directions in ecology. Bull. Ecol. Soc. Amer. 73(3):155–164.
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Developing Information Essential to Policy, Planning, and Management Decision-Making: The Promise of GIS
Jerry F. Franklin
Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) together are crucial tools for the challenges resource managers face now and into the twenty-first century. Remotely sensed data—such as aerial photographs and satellite imagery—have been available for many years, and the last decade has witnessed a rapid evolution in the kinds of sensors used, the analytic approaches, and the methodologies for interpreting data.
GIS goes a giant step beyond our previous tools for tracking spatial data. Drawing on both traditionally gathered and remotely sensed data, it allows us as resource managers to develop, analyze, and display spatially explicit information and gives us the ability, for the first time, to deal with larger spatial scales such as drainages (≤5000 acres) and regional landscapes (e.g., several million acres). The lessons of forestry over the last decade have taught us that we must expand our view, that we must step back to see how things relate at larger levels.
GIS may be the most important technology resource managers have acquired in recent memory. Following is an exploration of five arenas in which GIS should be invaluable—(1) inventorying and monitoring, (2) management planning, (3) policy setting, (4) research, and (5) consensual decision-making—and, finally, the question of who will be responsible for overseeing the universe GIS spawns.
Inventorying and Monitoring
Despite all our efforts at inventorying and talk about monitoring, we still have only a fuzzy idea of what quantities of resources we have, where they are located, and whether they are growing, shrinking, or holding steady.
Take, as ...
