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To adequately address challenges facing western rangelands, public and private land managers and local communities must strive to make more and better use of the scientific method in developing, implementing, and monitoring activities or actions designed to enhance these resources for the benefit of human and wildlife populations.
Previous wildlife research and management efforts have tended to rely heavily on observational data to recognize patterns and relationships and failed to involve the local affected communities in this process. Unfortunately, these approaches have not led to a satisfactory accumulation of reliable knowledge, let alone verified the results of management actions. In cases where biologists and managers have accumulated good data, they frequently have been unable to articulate information to local policy makers and the affected communities. In effect too many resource agencies have become "data rich, information poor, and communication illiterate."
This dilemma can
be addressed through the increased use of science in research, management,
extension, and policy making. Steps in this approach include increased collaboration
by all stakeholders, to include the affected communities, in the collection
and assimilation of observations, the development of specific hypotheses and
testable predictions about these observations, and the design, implementation,
and evaluation of suitable experiments to validate or refute the predictions.
These approaches can be used to test predictions about the effects of habitat
improvements, communication efforts, or other management actions on wildlife
populations and the local community.
This approach acknowledges the uncertainty about ecological relationships and economic conditions and emphasizes that it is essential for private and public land managers and the local communities to develop a willingness to learn in a coordinated, organized fashion. There are several terms that have been used to describe this approach. They include but are not limited to: Enlibra, Coordinated Resource Management, Adaptive Resource Management, Collaborative Learning, Sportsmen and Ranchers Summit, and Seeking Common Ground. Regardless of the terminology used, each approach embraces a process under which public and private land managers learn about the systems they are attempting to manage, while they are managing them. Public and private land managers must be cognizant of the importance of using baseline information about population dynamics and habitat use to prioritize and develop site specific management experiments. Then they must be willing to monitor and evaluate how the system responds to the management. This system feedback is essential to update and modify management actions. These approaches serve to reduce the uncertainty regarding future management. In this way, learning also becomes an objective of the process. Through these community-based conservation approaches, learning and reducing management uncertainty are valued to the extent in which they contribute to achieving the systems' desired future conditions and contribute to the economic stability of the local community. The solution derived must be based in science, but also offer the affected communities new management options or alternatives that address economic considerations.
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