Adaptive management wiki: Difference between revisions

The adaptive management approach assumes natural resource management policies and management actions are not static but adjusted based on the combination of new scientific and socio-economic information in order to improve management by learning from the ecosystems being affected.  Often people think adaptive management simply means “trial and error”, in which management policies and practices evolve in response to past performance and changing priorities, but in fact this misses an essential element of the concept which is deliberate experimentation.  

Although definitions of adaptive management vary by source, several key characteristics of the concept are universal and fundamental:

1. Learning; reducing key uncertainties  

There is explicit acknowledgement of uncertainties and knowledge gaps about the response of the system to management actions.  Reducing these uncertainties (i.e. learning) becomes one objective of management.