Ecosystem management inherently focuses on both competing and complimentary processes and species in a specific geographic location. Management often focuses on species specific needs rather than the needs of the ecosystem as a whole. Challenges arise when there are legal commitments that tend to focus on the needs of imperiled species often times listed under the Endangered Species Act. Does the focus on single species’ need result in further challenges to manage the ecosystems on which species rely? It is conceptually simple to maintain that if we repair ecosystem function to a mutually agreed upon state, this will result in maintenance of multiple species, regardless of commonality or rarity. However, the practice of choosing parameters and success criteria of recovery and ecosystem function becomes cumbersome and exceedingly complex when focusing on management of multiple species. This complexity results in a gradation of successful management. We offer a conceptual examination of this paradoxical challenge.
Results/Conclusions
We review the decision-making processes of several conservation programs in the Southwestern United States with a mandate to manage for multiple species. Breaking down the steps in these decision-making processes allows us to examine assumptions and decisions that are often made implicitly, resulting in examinations and justifications that become difficult to describe posteriori. We then take this examination and apply various program frameworks to several case studies to begin to outline successful or unsuccessful application of multi-species and ecosystem management. We suggest that slight adjustments in how we ask management questions and the processes of decision making in these situations, could result in realistic success criterion creation.
Results/Conclusions