Integrating Collaboration, Adaptive Management, and Scenario-Planning: Experiences at Las Cienegas National Conservation Area

Abstract

ABSTRACT. There is growing recognition that public lands cannot be managed as islands; rather, land management must address the ecological, social, and temporal complexity that often spans jurisdictions and traditional planning horizons. Collaborative decision making and adaptive management (CAM) have been promoted as methods to reconcile competing societal demands and respond to complex ecosystem dynamics. We detail the experiences of land managers and stakeholders in using CAM at Las Cienegas National Conservation Area (LCNCA), a highly valued site under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The CAM process at Las Cienegas is marked by strong stakeholder engagement, with four core elements: (1) shared watershed goals with measurable resource objectives; (2) relevant and reliable scientific information; (3) mechanisms to incorporate new information into decision making; and (4) shared learning to improve both the process and management actions. The combination of stakeholder engagement and adaptive management has led to agreement on contentious issues, more innovative solutions, and more effective land management. However, the region is now experiencing rapid changes outside managers' control, including climate change, human population growth, and reduced federal budgets, with large but unpredictable impacts on natural resources. Although the CAM experience provides a strong foundation for making the difficult and contentious management decisions that such changes are likely to require, neither collaboration nor adaptive management provides a sufficient structure for addressing the externalities that drive uncontrollable and unpredictable change. As a result, LCNCA is exploring two specific modifications to CAM that may better address emerging challenges, including: (1) creating nested resource objectives to distinguish between those objectives that may be crucial to maintaining ecological resilience from those that may hinder a flexible response to climate change, and (2) incorporating scenario planning into CAM to explore how climate change may interact with other drivers and alter options for the future, to identify robust management actions, and to prioritize ecological monitoring efforts. The experiences at LCNCA demonstrate how collaboration and adaptive management can be used to improve social and environmental outcomes and, with modifications, may help address the full range of complexity and change that threatens to overwhelm even the best efforts to sustain public lands.

Comparison of remote sensing indices for monitoring of desert cienegas

“…The presence of riparian and cienega vegetation in an otherwise arid landscape can increase overall biodiversity of a region by 50% (Sabo et al 2005) and cienegas are recognized as hosting regionally rare and unique plant communities (Caves et al 2013). Cienegas also provide a number of critical hydrologic services: they regulate downstream flow regimes and indicate the presence of nearsurface water availability and landscape-level hydrologic condition (Hendrickson and Minckley 1984;Minckley, Brunelle, and Turner 2013).…”

Development of a Shared Vision for Groundwater Management to Protect and Sustain Baseflows of the Upper San Pedro River, Arizona, USA

“…The involved partners more deeply understand the need for management measures, but are engaged in the actual exploration and development of possible alternatives, and witness the results and progress toward specific desired outcomes through adaptive management over time [35]. This was certainly the case for the Partnership as they first quantified the annual yield from a wide array of member agency water conservation, reuse, and recharge projects, then implemented dozens of them since 1998 [6] (Figure 2).…”

Handling uncertainty through adaptiveness in planning approaches: comparing adaptive delta management and the water diplomacy framework

“…To handle uncertainty in WDF the notion that neither collaborative management nor adaptive management are fully suited to plan for networked situations led to the proposal for CAM (Caves et al, 2013). CAM, however, neglects the dynamic nature of complex systems, resulting in ontic uncertainty.…”

“…Planners and water managers can strive for adaptiveness in three ways. First, by adaptively managing resources through focused experiments and closely monitoring change (Caves, Bodner, Simms, Fisher, & Robertson, 2013;Walters, 1986). Second, by increasing the adaptive capacity of institutions and deliberate learning from past experiments (van den Brink, Meijerink, Termeer, & Gupta, 2014).…”