Operational Plan for the Restoration of Diadromous Fishes to the ...

Appendix D - Adaptive Management Guidance for Fisheries Management in
the Penobscot Basin
Authors: Greg Mackey and Joan Trial
Adaptive management is a strategy that employs the scientific method to continually
assess and refine management. Adaptive management relies on establishing
management plans based on a priori hypotheses (predicted results), assessment
plans to collect data necessary to evaluate a management strategy, and a feedback
mechanism to inform and improve management as results are obtained. Adaptive
management is central to Atlantic salmon recovery and should be employed with all
fish management activities in the Penobscot basin. The limiting steps in
successfully using adaptive management are collecting sufficient data, analyzing
and interpreting results, and using the results to improve management on a regular
basis. Knowledge of these limitations should help managers prepare strategies to
successfully employ adaptive management, and also to explicitly identify
management actions where adaptive management will not be successfully used
because of operational or budgetary constraints.
Managers will need to create adaptive management programs for each management
action. Although adaptive management follows well defined steps, the particulars of
the process are project dependent and generally cannot be elucidated beforehand.
However, some fishery management actions, such as stocking, can be generalized
to an adaptive management approach, and this general approach can then easily be
altered to suit needs (Table 1).
The general adaptive management process focuses on defining goals and
assumptions, and stating management strategy, expected outcome(s), and how
assessment will be performed. This forces managers to clearly identify these
elements before work is begun. This approach is easily transferrable to stocking
(Table 2), or other management actions.
Table 1. A general adaptive management approach adapted from S. Crawford, S.
Matchett, and K. Reid, 2005. “Decision Analysis/Adaptive Management (DAAM) for Great
PRFP Page 162