Abstract
Meeting the diverse sustainability targets of modern society has led to the development of national‐level management frameworks meant to guide resource management actions and conservation funding decisions. In U.S. rangelands, state‐and‐transition models have been developed within the Ecological Site Description (ESD) Database as an application of alternative state theory and to move the discipline toward a more dynamic platform for resource management. After 15 years of development, and with government‐mandated collaboration among federal agencies, these models are set to become one of the world's largest guiding frameworks for terrestrial ecosystem management. Yet, ESD state‐and‐transition models are being marketed for broad‐scale application without a national‐level critique evaluating their strengths and limitations. In this article, we conduct a national assessment of ESDs with a central focus on evaluating the specific details of ESD state‐and‐transition models. Importantly, we are not evaluating the conceptual underpinnings of the state‐and‐transition management framework, but rather its application. Specifically, we (1) quantify and summarize the information presented in ESD state‐and‐transition models; (2) determine whether ESDs fully meet U.S. Congress's goal of a nationally consistent system for defining, mapping, and interpreting ecological sites; (3) identify limitations and logical holes in ESD predictions; and (4) evaluate whether conservation funding priorities are consistent with output from ESDs. Our evaluation reveals multiple shortcomings in the application of the state‐and‐transition model concept within ESDs, primarily that they are highly subjective, inconsistent in design and application, focus on a single historical climax community, and overuse grazing as a driver of both ecological degradation and restoration. Considering that many of these limitations have been a consistent criticism of rangeland assessment procedures throughout the history of the discipline, state‐and‐transition models within ESDs will require major reconstruction beyond the current plans for revision if they are to meet society's demand for more effective management and utilization of rangeland resources. While ESDs were developed to link science and management in rangeland ecology, our assessment suggests well‐intentioned management frameworks built upon expert opinion and qualitative inputs will not effectively shift ecosystem management from long‐held practices rooted in community climax theory to modern scientific perspectives based on alternative state theory.
Highlights
The global human population has placed greater demands on the natural environment in the latter half of the 20th century than at any other point in human history, resulting in worldwide degradation of the majority of the world’s ecosystems (MA 2005)
While the development of Ecological Site Description (ESD) began 15 years ago and continues today, our evaluation shows ESDs are subject to many of the same criticisms used to justify the move from the old range model (West 1982, West et al 1984, West and Hassan 1985, Wilson 1989, Laycock 1991, NRC 1994)
New criticisms of ESDs have emerged that are associated with the lack of spatiotemporal considerations (Bestelmeyer et al 2011), the presence of multiple impractical restoration outcomes, the inability to use ESDs to project state transitions that will be important in the future, and the mismatch between conservation funding of management actions relative to the importance of those management actions in ESDs
Summary
The global human population has placed greater demands on the natural environment in the latter half of the 20th century than at any other point in human history, resulting in worldwide degradation of the majority of the world’s ecosystems (MA 2005). Theoretical advancements have led to a major disciplinary shift from a climax-based perspective of tightly coupled, internally regulated ecosystems (e.g., Clement’s climatic climax theory, 1916; Tansley’s polyclimax theory, 1935; Whittaker’s climax pattern theory, 1953) to an alternative stable state perspective where heterogeneity, resilience, external forcing drivers, non-linearity, and transient equilibria are central components of ecological assembly (Holling 1973, Sutherland 1974, May 1977, Scheffer et al 2001, Scheffer and Carpenter 2003, Peters et al 2004) This shift in ecological theory has contributed to changes in existing management directives and the emergence of resilience-based management frameworks in terrestrial and aquatic systems (e.g., The Nature Conservancy’s Marine Resilience Program; USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Ecological Site Descriptions). This new purview requires national and international management frameworks capable of establishing the trade-offs of implementing management actions while prioritizing conservation funding to ensure the sustainable provision of goods and services for modern and future societies
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