Judging adaptive management practices of U.S. agencies.

All U.S. federal agencies administering environmental laws purport to practice adaptive management (AM), but little is known about how they actually implement this conservation tool. A gap between the theory and practice of AM is revealed in judicial decisions reviewing agency adaptive management plans. We analyzed all U.S. federal court opinions published through 1 January 2015 to identify the agency AM practices courts found most deficient. The shortcomings included lack of clear objectives and processes, monitoring thresholds, and defined actions triggered by thresholds. This trio of agency shortcuts around critical, iterative steps characterizes what we call AM-lite. Passive AM differs from active AM in its relative lack of management interventions through experimental strategies. In contrast, AM-lite is a distinctive form of passive AM that fails to provide for the iterative steps necessary to learn from management. Courts have developed a sophisticated understanding of AM and often offer instructive rather than merely critical opinions. The role of the judiciary is limited by agency discretion under U.S. administrative law. But courts have overturned some agency AM-lite practices and insisted on more rigorous analyses to ensure that the promised benefits of structured learning and fine-tuned management have a reasonable likelihood of occurring. Nonetheless, there remains a mismatch in U.S. administrative law between the flexibility demanded by adaptive management and the legal objectives of transparency, public participation, and finality.

Learning from conservation planning for the U.S. National Wildlife Refuges.

The U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System has nearly completed its first round of unit-level, comprehensive conservation plans (CCPs) and will soon begin required revisions. Laws and policies governing refuge planning emphasize ecological integrity, landscape-scale conservation, and adaptive management. We evaluated 185 CCPs completed during 2005-2011, which cover 324 of 555 national wildlife refuges. We reviewed CCP prescriptions addressing 5 common conservation issues (habitat and game, nongame, imperiled, and invasive species) and 3 specialized topics (landscape-scale conservation, climate change, and environmental quality). Common conservation issues received prescriptions in >90% of CCPs. Specialized topics received more variable treatment. Prescriptions for aquatic connectivity, water quantity, and climate-change impacts increased over the study period. Except for climate change, direct actions were the most common type of management prescription, followed by plans or studies. Most CCPs stated a commitment to adaptive management and prescribed monitoring for common conservation objectives; other aspects of planning for adaptive management were often lacking, despite strong support for adaptive management in the conservation planning literature. To better address refuge-specific threats, we recommend that revised plans explicitly match identified refuge issues with prescriptions, particularly for under-represented concerns such as novel pests and pathogens. We recommend incorporating triggers into monitoring frameworks and specifying actions that will occur when threshold values are reached to improve support for adaptive management. Revised CCPs should better reflect work that refuges already undertake to extend conservation objectives beyond their borders and better engage with regional conservation efforts to continue this work. More thorough landscape-scale threat assessments and explicit prioritization of planned actions would further improve conservation effectiveness. Excellent examples of all recommended practices exist within the CCPs we examined; sharing best planning practices would improve planning efficiency within the refuge system.

A landmark environmental law looks ahead.

In late December 1973, the United States enacted what some would come to call "the pitbull of environmental laws." In the 50 years since, the formidable regulatory teeth of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been credited with considerable successes, obliging agencies to draw upon the best available science to protect species and habitats. Yet human pressures continue to push the planet toward extinctions on a massive scale. With that prospect looming, and with scientific understanding ever changing, Science invited experts to discuss how the ESA has evolved and what its future might hold. -Brad Wible.

Climate change adaptation for the US National Wildlife Refuge System.

Since its establishment in 1903, the National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) has grown to 635 units and 37 Wetland Management Districts in the United States and its territories. These units provide the seasonal habitats necessary for migratory waterfowl and other species to complete their annual life cycles. Habitat conversion and fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, and competition for water have stressed refuges for decades, but the interaction of climate change with these stressors presents the most recent, pervasive, and complex conservation challenge to the NWRS. Geographic isolation and small unit size compound the challenges of climate change, but a combined emphasis on species that refuges were established to conserve and on maintaining biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health provides the NWRS with substantial latitude to respond. Individual symptoms of climate change can be addressed at the refuge level, but the strategic response requires system-wide planning. A dynamic vision of the NWRS in a changing climate, an explicit national strategic plan to implement that vision, and an assessment of representation, redundancy, size, and total number of units in relation to conservation targets are the first steps toward adaptation. This adaptation must begin immediately and be built on more closely integrated research and management. Rigorous projections of possible futures are required to facilitate adaptation to change. Furthermore, the effective conservation footprint of the NWRS must be increased through land acquisition, creative partnerships, and educational programs in order for the NWRS to meet its legal mandate to maintain the biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health of the system and the species and ecosystems that it supports.