Management Approaches

Adaptive Management / Assessment and Monitoring

The complex nature of marine ecosystems and the breadth of human interactions with those ecosystems requires that marine resources be managed using an adaptive approach. Thus, management actions can be taken and there results evaluated over time, allowing for appropriate adjustments to be made to better manage threats, such as habitat degradation. Adaptive management requires a long-term commitment to the assessment and monitoring of habitats, but facilitates improvements in scientific knowledge of status and trends. With such a commitment, it may be possible to determine:

If conservation or sustainable resource use objectives are being accomplished;
If unintended consequences are resulting from existing management approaches;
If other management approaches may be more effective.

Assessments of the status of marine and coastal habitats are essential to provide a comprehensive approach to their management. All assessment programmes, regardless of their purpose, are dependent upon the measurement of a set of characteristics, or indicators. For example, indicators important to assessing the status of marine habitats may include; the structure of marine communities (species abundance, age structure, species diversity, and spatial distribution); the physical structure of the habitat (bathymetry, physical oceanography, geology); threats (exploitation rates, species invasions, pollutant loads, and siltation rates); and socio-economic attributes of the habitat (types, rates and patterns of resource use, economic value of resource use or non-use).

Monitoring programmes provide for the assessment of habitat status over time, through periodic measurement of a specific set of indicators. Thus, monitoring programmes can provide managers with crucial information for evaluating the use of marine resources and the efficacy of conservation measures. For researchers, monitoring programmes provide valuable data that are needed to identify trends in the health of living resources, trends that reveal fundamental features of how ecosystems function and help scientist distinguish between changes that are the result of human influences and those that are natural environmental fluctuations.

A variety of assessments have thus far been performed in marine and coastal habitats, and a number of long-term monitoring programmes are currently in place.