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Applied Ecology and Natural Resource Management

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

Applied Ecology and Natural Resource Management

By Guy R. McPherson and Stephen DeStefano. 2003. Cambridge University Press (http:// us.cambridge.org). 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211. 165 p. ISBN 0-521-00975-8 (paperback).

The incorporation of ecological information is probably the most critical step in making decisions about the management of natural resources. However, because of the complexity of both ecological information and its potential application to management prescriptions, it is also among the most difficult tasks facing resource managers. There has long existed a divide between researchers, who are often searching for generality among ecological relationships, and managers, who seek specific information about the systems they manage. For managers, bridging this divide is critical to preserving biological diversity, ensuring sustainability, and meeting the resource needs of an ever-expanding population. For researchers who are interested in applied ecology, bridging this divide is critical if their efforts are to move from the journal page to real world applications within the field of resource management.

Bridging this gap between ecological research and ecologically based resource management is the objective of the new book by Guy McPherson and Stephen DeStefano entitled Applied Ecology and Natural Resource Management. In their book, the authors concentrate on vegetation ecology as a foundation for vegetation management. Vegetation management is, in turn, offered as critically important to animal ecology and the management of wildlife populations. According to the authors, their book is designed to: (1) organize and evaluate concepts, hypotheses, and data relevant to the application of ecological principles, (2) serve as a link to a vast and growing collection of ecological literature, and (3) provide a framework for the application of ecological research to the management of ecosystems. Their stated target audience is students and managers who are familiar with the fundamentals of ecology and wish to use ecological knowledge in the management of ecosystems.

The five chapters of this book deal with various aspects of ecology and applied ecological research. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the science of ecology and premises of scientific research and natural resource management. In this chapter, the authors emphasize the importance of having clearly stated goals and objectives to allow the selection of appropriate management tools. Using the example of attempting to restore presettlement fire regimes in the hope of restoring presettlement ecosystem structure and species diversity, the authors make an excellent point: profound and large-scale changes have occurred in the physical environment and biological communities of North America since European settlement. Consequently, restoration of historic fire regimes does not guarantee the restoration of presettlement conditions. Rather, a new understanding of these altered systems is needed to allow fire to be used as a management tool to maintain biological and structural diversity. The restoration of contemporary ecosystems to an arbitrary earlier point in time should not be viewed as a well- defined or ecologically sound management goal. The second chapter discusses ecological relationships such as interference, herbivory, and seed dispersal. However, most of the second chapter examines the relative merits of descriptive studies, comparative studies, modeling, and experiments. The authors present their strongest argument in favor of experiments, emphasizing the superiority of experiments in determining the mechanisms of ecological interactions. The third chapter discusses methods to describe the structure and composition of vegetation communities. The authors provide a good discussion of various measures and analyses of vegetation communities including diversity indices, ordination, and classification. The fourth chapter discusses the evolution of successional theory ranging from Clement's organismic concept to Tilman's "trade-off" models. The authors also evaluate tools for the study of succession, including monitoring, comparative studies, and experiments. Once again, the importance of experiments in determining the mechanisms of succession and other ecosystem functions is heavily emphasized. The final chapter attempts to close the gap between science and management by providing a synthesis of goals, evaluation, relevance, and constraints of applying ecological knowledge to natural resource management.

Overall, the book is well written and does a good job of introducing ecological concepts that have a bearing on natural resource management. At several points in the book, the authors stress that ecological experiments are critical to understanding the mechanisms responsible for changes and patterns observed in the field. This assertion is correctfield-based experiments are a vital part of understanding contemporary communities and predicting future change. However, as the authors state, "the speed of scientific inquiry rarely matches the urgency of environmental problems." In the day-to-day world of natural resource management, managers are often faced with "burning buildings" that result from relatively sudden perturbations within communities and ecosystems. Using the southern Appalachians as an example, the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) was introduced into eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina less than 2 years ago. Because this exotic insect can kill eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees in 4-8 years, it may rapidly cause large-scale alteration to forests dominated by hemlock. In a situation such as this, managers must react quickly with the full range of control options. Effective monitoring must be in place to provide feedback about which options have the greatest positive impact to allow management to quickly adapt before a species or community is effectively lost. While the authors do provide a brief discussion of monitoring in Chapter 4, the importance of ecological monitoring to successful resource management warrants greater discussion.

According to the authors, this book is not intended to provide specific recommendations to resource managers, since management decisions are site specific and must be made within temporal, spatial, and objective constraints. With this understanding in mind, I highly recommend this book as a valuable source of information for students who one day wish to attempt to straddle the line between ecological research and science-based management. I also believe the book would be of interest to managers interested in a more broad- scale conceptual discussion of ecosystem management. While this book cannot be used as a primer for on-site management decisions, I found it to be thought-provoking and helpful for considering the larger ecological context under which resource managers must operate.

Reviewed by Michael A. Jenkins, Ecologist, National Park Service, Twin Creeks Natural Resources Center, 1314 Cherokee Orchard Road, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg, TN 37738. Phone: (865) 430-4742; E-mail: mike_jenkins@nps.gov

Copyright Society of American Foresters Aug 2003

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