‘So what?’ The role of adaptive management in the Muskoka watershed.

The process is not trivial, but has the merit (and the need for) involving all interests in the watershed working together in a process of integrated watershed management.

By Neil Hutchinson.

Over the summer, we have explored various means of responding to the threats that face our Muskoka watershed. We have talked of collaboration to address future challenges and have had three articles that laid out visions of our future.

These visions — from Indigenous, scientific and leadership perspectives — were remarkably coherent in setting a management direction for the future. (See previous articles by Christopher Stock, Peter Sale and Jeff Lehman).

But how will we know if we are moving in the right direction or not?

While individuals may have an opinion of watershed health based on their own perceptions, this will vary with the individual. We need a formal plan — one that translates broad goals and objectives (a “healthy watershed” for example) into narrower components of what contributes to our watershed health. (i.e., hydrology, water quality, forest fragmentation, avian diversity, wetland integrity — what are often termed “valued ecosystem components”).

From there, we need to find a way to measure the status of these components and repeat it at regular intervals. We have started down that path with the Muskoka Watershed Report Card that we, as the Muskoka Watershed Council, prepare every five years.

Measurement and reporting, while critical, need to be placed in the context of “so what?” Is it a problem if one indicator is trending up or down? Are stable values of environmental elements desirable? How much can one indicator change before we are concerned?

This is a challenge — for those who think that any environmental change is unwelcome, to those who feel that change, no matter how extensive, is just the “cost of doing business.”

It may be a challenge, but I believe the Muskoka Watershed Council should take on a bold initiative of:

1. converting our broad objectives for the watershed into objectives for specific “valued ecosystem components”;
2. developing specific measurable indicators to track by regular measurement;
3. implementing the monitoring and reporting programs;
4. identifying “thresholds,” the limits to environmental change that are ecologically and socially acceptable and;
5. the lesser changes that might indicate we are heading in that direction.

If we know that small changes lead to an undesirable threshold, then we need to reverse that trend before we get there — the necessary management response.

The necessary management response, however, cannot be anticipated — we cannot reasonably predict future changes ahead of time, let alone how to address them. This is especially problematic in our present environment of multiple stressors, where many small factors may produce unanticipated changes.

This leads to the need for “adaptive management” — response plans that lay out specific actions and timelines (say, investigation of causation) when small changes are observed so that the appropriate management plan can be developed and implemented to stop or reverse the trend before we reach our previously identified environmental thresholds.

All of this must be formalized in a “response framework.” In the past, “adaptive management” has been characterized across a spectrum from “if something changes we will figure what to do” (which is ineffective) to “we must anticipate every change and challenge and have a plan ready in case it happens” (which is unworkable).

Setting targets, with thresholds and warnings inside of a defined process to respond before they become serious, however, is workable and was developed and has been practiced for the past 15 years on large development projects in the Mackenzie Valley of northern Canada.

The process is not trivial but has the merit (and the need for) involving all interests in the watershed working together in a process of integrated watershed management.

This is the latest in our summer series of articles from the Muskoka Watershed Council on “Living in A Changing Watershed” published on MuskokaRegion.com. Each explores a common theme of integration and relationships — how we cannot thrive without understanding how ecological forces, including human actions, shape the world we live in. Our series editor and this week’s contributor is Dr. Neil Hutchinson, a retired aquatic scientist, Bracebridge resident and Director: Muskoka Watershed Council, Friends of the Muskoka Watershed and Georgian Bay Forever.