Ecological Assessment

Landscapes change over time, due to natural processes (succession), disturbances (natural or human-induced), or deliberate interventions by managers. Assessing observed changes and evaluating them relative to an expectation—ecological assessment—is a crucial step in the adaptive management process. In this chapter we begin by posing a framework in which to evaluate and visualize change in ecological data sets, such as might be collected as part of a monitoring program. Ordination (Chap. 4 ) provides this framework. The assessment is articulated in terms of change vectors, movement over time in an ordination that summarizes ecological condition. For discrete events, including management interventions conducted as experiments, this framing leads to impact evaluation, which entails various forms of before/after, control/intervention, or before/after/control/impact inferential designs. Ecological assessment is the final task in the adaptive management cycle. As such, this is the step that defines adaptive management and makes ecosystem management a science-based enterprise.