Ecosystem management

Ecosystem management is a process that aims to conserve major ecological services and restore natural resources while meeting the socioeconomic, political and cultural and needs of current and future generations. The principal objective of ecosystem management is the efficient maintenance and ethical use of natural resources. It is a multifaceted and holistic approach which requires a significant change in how the natural and human environments are identified.

Several approaches to effective ecosystem management engage conservation efforts at both a local or landscape level and involves: adaptive management, natural resource management, strategic management, and command and control management.

The definitions of ecosystem management are typically vague. Several core principles define and bound the concept and provide operational meaning:

As a concept of natural resource management, ecosystem management remains both ambiguous and controversial, in part because some of its formulations rest on policy and scientific assertions that are contested. These assertions are important to understanding much of the conflict surrounding ecosystem management. Professional natural resource managers, typically operating from within government bureaucracies and professional organizations, often mask debate over controversial assertions by depicting ecosystem management as an evolution of past management approaches.

Stakeholders are individuals or groups of people who are affected by environmental decisions and actions, but they also may have power to influence the outcomes of environmental decisions relating to ecosystem management. The complex nature of decisions made in ecosystem management, from local to international scales, requires stakeholder participation from a diversity of knowledge, perceptions and values of nature. Stakeholders will often have different interests in ecosystem services. This means effective management of ecosystems requires a negotiation process that develops mutual trust in issues of common interest with the objective of creating mutually beneficial partnerships.

Adaptive management is based on the concept that predicting future influences/disturbance to an ecosystem is limited and unclear. Therefore, the goal of adaptive management is to manage the ecosystem so it maintains the greatest amount of ecological integrity, but also to utilize management practices that have the ability to change based on new experience and insights.

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