Abstract
As collaborative groups gain popularity as an alternative means for addressing conflict over management of public lands, the need for methods to evaluate their effectiveness in achieving ecological and social goals increases. However, frameworks that examine both effectiveness of the collaborative process and its outcomes are poorly developed or altogether lacking. This paper presents and evaluates the utility of the holistic ecosystem health indicator (HEHI), a framework that integrates multiple ecological and socioeconomic criteria to evaluate management effectiveness of collaborative processes. Through the development and application of the HEHI to a collaborative in northern Arizona, the Diablo Trust, we present the opportunities and challenges in using this framework to evaluate the ecological and social outcomes of collaborative adaptive management. Baseline results from the first application of the HEHI are presented as an illustration of its potential as a co-adaptive management tool. We discuss lessons learned from the process of selecting indicators and potential issues to their long-term implementation. Finally, we provide recommendations for applying this framework to monitoring and adaptive management in the context of collaborative management.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Diablo Trust, and in particular, the Flying M and Bar T Bar Ranches, for their constant support and participation in this study. We would also like to thank Mike Hannemann and Dan Rusell (U. S. Forest Service), Stephen Williams and Kevin Eldrege (A.Z. State Land Department), and Rick Miller (A.Z. Game and Fish Department) for contributing time, data, and personnel to the monitoring field work. Special thanks to the late John Prather, whose expertise in field ecological protocols and GIS analysis was invaluable to this project. Numerous undergraduate and graduate students contributed to this project, including A. Richey, E. Ruther, R. Reider, V. Humphries, A. Cronin, E. Bernstein, L. Taylor, L.Walters, S. Mezulis and undergraduates in the Agroecology Summer Program from Prescott College. This project was funded in part by the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 Sustainability Award, the Community-Based Collaborative Research Consortium (CBCRC) at the University of Virginia, and student assistance and in-kind contributions from Prescott College. Writing of this manuscript was made possible through support from the National Science Foundation Integrated Graduate Education and Training (IGERT) in Urban Ecology Program, Grant No. DGE 0504248, and the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding entities.
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Muñoz-Erickson, T.A., Aguilar-González, B., Loeser, M.R.R. et al. A Framework to Evaluate Ecological and Social Outcomes of Collaborative Management: Lessons from Implementation with a Northern Arizona Collaborative Group. Environmental Management 45, 132–144 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-009-9400-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-009-9400-y