Adaptive management: Learning the path of resilience

Excerpt

The title of this new volume, The Sciences and Art of Adaptive Management, resonates well with the Soil and Water Conservation Society's mission to advance the science and art of natural resource conservation.

The book was developed through the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (SANREM) Collaborative Research Support Program managed at Virginia Tech, with support from the United States Agency for International Development.

The 25 authors represent a rich knowledge base related to sustainable agriculture and natural resource management internationally. Keith Moore, the editor, effectively brings together the authors working in different disciplines and locations into one coherent framework.

As Moore describes in the preface, “Adaptive management is a structured process of learning by doing.” Adaptive management is not just a trendy term of the day; it is an approach that will become only more essential in the future to adequately understand the interlinking systems that affect landscape health and to successfully mitigate negative impacts on the environment.

The book is organized around the SANREM landscape systems framework, which encompasses the interactions and impacts of nested systems: field systems, farm enterprise systems, community watershed systems, ecosystems, policy and market systems, and innovation systems.

Landscapes are described in the book…