Abstract
This paper reviews the experience gained in three South African national parks (Kruger, Table Mountain and Bontebok) with regard to the adaptive management of fire for the conservation of biodiversity. In the Kruger National Park, adaptive approaches have evolved over the past 15 years, beginning initially as a form of ‘informed trial and error’, but progressing towards active adaptive management in which landscape-scale, experimental burning treatments are being applied in order to learn. In the process, significant advances in understanding regarding the role and management of fire have been made. Attempts have been made to transfer the approaches developed in Kruger National Park to the other two national parks. However, little progress has been made to date, both because of a failure to provide an agreed context for the introduction of adaptive approaches, and because (in the case of Bontebok National Park) too little time has passed to be able to make an assessment. Fire management interventions, ultimately, will manifest themselves in terms of biodiversity outcomes, but definite links between fire interventions and biodiversity outcomes have yet to be made. Conservation implications: Significant challenges face the managers of fire-prone and fire adapted ecosystems, where the attainment of ecosystem goals may require approaches (like encouraging high-intensity fires at hot and dry times of the year) that threaten societal goals related to safety. In addition, approaches to fire management have focused on encouraging particular fire patterns in the absence of a sound understanding of their ecological outcomes. Adaptive management offers a framework for addressing these issues, but will require higher levels of agreement, monitoring and assessment than have been the case to date.
Highlights
South African National Parks (SANParks) have a primary mandate to conserve, on the land that they manage, South Africa’s biodiversity, landscapes and associated heritage assets
Adaptive management was introduced into the Kruger National Park (KNP) in the early 1990s (Biggs & Rogers 2003) and, as practised by SANParks, has the following key features (SANParks 2008):
The above may be regarded as ‘passive adaptive management’ (Wilhere 2002), which involves the formulation of predictive models, making policy decisions based on these models, and revising the models or the policy as monitoring data become available
Summary
South African National Parks (SANParks) have a primary mandate to conserve, on the land that they manage, South Africa’s biodiversity, landscapes and associated heritage assets. Managers of most national parks have used a range of interventions to achieve the goals of biodiversity conservation, but in recent years there has been a growing recognition that top-down, ‘command-and-control’ management can be both ineffective and damaging (Holling & Meffe 1996). This paper reviews the development and use of adaptive approaches to manage fire in the KNP, TMNP and BNP. It provides an assessment of the degree to which these approaches have impacted on the conservation of biodiversity, and discusses the ongoing challenges that will face managers when expanding these approaches to other national parks
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