Putting monitoring first: designing accountable ecosystem restoration and management plans. S.C. Ralph and G.C. Poole. In Restoration of Puget Sound Rivers. D. Montgomery, S. Bolton, and D. Booth, editors. University of Washington Press, Seattle. 505p. 2003.
Recovery of Puget Sound rivers and their native fish fauna will depend upon carefully documenting the ultimate effectiveness of restoration actions. Yet, as currently designed and implemented, monitoring programs are predestined to fail in this task. Consequently, our attempts to implement iterative, adaptive restoration or management actions will also fail unless managers and researchers: (1) alter their current conceptual models about the relationship between monitoring and management/restoration; (2) design and implement monitoring programs before planning restoration/management actions; (3) recognize the need for hierarchical monitoring programs and learn how to implement them; and (4) eliminate myths about monitoring, including the assumption that we can generate reliable new information about management and restoration actions simply by observing their outcomes. In order for monitoring programs to provide reliable and timely information required by iterative and adaptive approaches to ecosystem restoration and management, monitoring programs must serve as a scientifically rigorous framework for “Empirical Management” of natural resources. To accomplish this, managers and researchers must work together first to design hierarchically-structured monitoring experiments and then to plan on-the-ground management and restoration actions that serve as experimental manipulations in the context of the monitoring experiment. Unlike current approaches, this empirical approach has the potential to generate rigorous new scientific information about the efficacy of implemented actions and therefore could support adaptive, iterative improvement in management and restoration plans.
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