What can adaptive management do for our fish, forests, food, and biodiversity?

Society invests heavily in science and research aimed at providing guidance on how to manage biological resources, yet the world is filled with too many management failures. Why is this? One reason is that the task itself is so difficult—the environment varies, we never really know the underlying processes that drive population change, and observation errors can be very large when we study populations in the wild. But worse than uncertainty itself is the fact that we tend to underestimate uncertainty. We place too much confidence in our assessment and forecasting models. Fisheries, conservation, and pest control have much to gain by embracing so-called adaptive management. Adaptive management forces us to acknowledge uncertainty, and to follow a plan by which decisions are modified as we learn by doing. Indeed, we can expect little more than continued failures if adaptive management is not adopted in a determined and widespread fashion. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.