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heart of the Fire Ecology Program is the gathering of
data and information that is needed for fire management
planning and activities. This work includes, collaborating
with resource managers and scientists to develop fire
management objectives that will meet land management
goals, designing and implementing monitoring programs
to determine if objectives are met, and identifying
questions that need to be answered through research
studies. Providing this type of information to managers
is critical to ensuring a scientifically-based fire
management program that will continue to improve as
new knowledge is gained.
The National Park Service is exploring
ways to use adaptive management to continuously improve
the management of Park resources. Adaptive management
is an approach that is applicable to many resource issues
at many scales, from testing alternative management
approaches at specific sites, to ecosystem-based management
at the watershed, landscape, or Park unit scales. The
purpose of adaptive management is to aggressively use
management intervention as a tool to strategically investigate
the functioning of an ecosystem. Management actions
are designed to test key hypotheses about ecosystem
function. The approach differs from 'informed
trial-and-error' which uses the best available
knowledge to generate a risk-averse, 'best guess'
management strategy, which is then modified as new information
alters the 'best guess'.
Adaptive management identifies
uncertainties that are associated with management actions,
and then establishes methodologies to test hypotheses
that are generated by those uncertainties. Management
actions are used not only to achieve desired future
landscape conditions, but also as a tool for the generation
of knowledge about those systems. The adaptive management
process may be portrayed in a nine-step cycle. Successful
adaptive management requires managers to complete all
of the following successive steps:
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