From planning to implementation: explaining connections between adaptive management and population models

Abstract

The management of natural systems often involves periodic interventions that must be decided without a complete understanding of how the system responds to our actions. It is in this situation of recurrent decision-making under uncertainty that adaptive management (AM) has been repeatedly advocated, with each decision round providing an opportunity to improve our knowledge in order to facilitate future decisions: the "learning while managing" tenet of AM. When the subject of management is a wildlife population (that is harvested, is a pest or is threatened with extinction), population models will be at the core of the AM process. We provide an overview of the steps in AM, from the set-up to ..