Global change and conservation triage on National Wildlife Refuges
Global change and conservation triage on National Wildlife Refuges
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全球变化和国家野生动物保护区的保护分类
DOI：
10.5751/es-07986-200414
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发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Laura Taylor
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
F. Johnson;M. Eaton;G. McMahon;R. Nilius;Michael R. Bryant;D. Case;Julien Martin;N. Wood;Laura Taylor
美国国家野生动物保护区在社会生态系统适应气候变化、土地利用变化和其他全球变化过程中发挥着重要作用。沿海避难所已经受到海平面上升和其他变化进程的威胁，而这些变化在很大程度上超出了他们的影响能力，与此同时，他们还面临着预算紧缩和人员减少的问题。我们与美国大西洋沿岸的NWR管理人员一起参加了研讨会，以了解他们在全球变化过程中面临的问题，并开始了多学科合作，利用决策科学来帮助解决这些问题。我们正在采用以价值为中心的方法，根据土地管理者的资源目标以及可能从避难所提供的商品和服务中受益的利益攸关方的目标作出管理决策。从我们的研讨会中产生的两个见解是，管理可以影响结果的规模与环境过程的规模之间存在明显的不匹配，以及需要考虑与生态系统产品和服务相关的目标，这些目标传统上没有被避难所明确考虑（例如，防止风暴潮）。目标的扩大使决策过程复杂化，但也提供了与可能与保护区议程不同的利益相关者合作的机会，以及解决跨尺度问题的机会。从实际的角度来看，我们认识到需要(1)有效地分配有限的员工时间和预算，以便在当前避难所设计下对现有项目和资源进行短期管理；(2)制定长期优先事项，以获取或保护新的土地/栖息地，以补充或取代现有的避难所足迹，从而随着系统的发展保持避难所的价值。以这种方式组织决策问题有助于更好地了解规模问题，并表明长期解决办法将需要对目标进行重大重新评估，以便更好地反映难民对社会的全面价值。我们讨论了一些未来的考虑因素，通过开发新的优化方法来解决考虑未来条件不确定性的动态问题，将这两个问题整合到一个单一的框架中。
National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) in the United States play an important role in the adaptation of social-ecological systems to climate change, land-use change, and other global-change processes. Coastal refuges are already experiencing threats from sea-level rise and other change processes that are largely beyond their ability to influence, while at the same time facing tighter budgets and reduced staff. We engaged in workshops with NWR managers along the U.S. Atlantic coast to understand the problems they face from global-change processes and began a multidisciplinary collaboration to use decision science to help address them. We are applying a values-focused approach to base management decisions on the resource objectives of land managers, as well as those of stakeholders who may benefit from the goods and services produced by a refuge. Two insights that emerged from our workshops were a conspicuous mismatch between the scale at which management can influence outcomes and the scale of environmental processes, and the need to consider objectives related to ecosystem goods and services that traditionally have not been explicitly considered by refuges (e.g., protection from storm surge). The broadening of objectives complicates the decision-making process, but also provides opportunities for collaboration with stakeholders who may have agendas different from those of the refuge, as well as an opportunity for addressing problems across scales. From a practical perspective, we recognized the need to (1) efficiently allocate limited staff time and budgets for short-term management of existing programs and resources under the current refuge design and (2) develop long-term priorities for acquiring or protecting new land/habitat to supplement or replace the existing refuge footprint and thus sustain refuge values as the system evolves over time. Structuring the decision-making problem in this manner facilitated a better understanding of the issues of scale and suggested that a long-term solution will require a significant reassessment of objectives to better reflect the comprehensive values of refuges to society. We discuss some future considerations to integrate these two problems into a single framework by developing novel optimization approaches for dynamic problems that account for uncertainty in future conditions.