John Steffenson
ABSTRACT
Ecological assessments at a landscape scale are taking place in several regions throughout the United States including the Sierra Nevada, Southern Appalachia, Southeast Alaska and the Interior Columbia Basin. The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) is a highly visible, large project covering approximately 144 million acres in seven states including Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada and California. Scientists and specialists from a variety of Federal agencies are working together to develop an assessment of past, current and potential future conditions within the Interior Columbia Basin using the best scientific techniques and state-of-the-art technology including Geographic Information Systems. Spatial and temporal analyses are the core of this effort and its information base is critical to the successful implementation of an ecosystem-based approach to land management. This paper attempts to describe the on-going work of that team and the implications it has for the development of information systems and their use within the context of Ecosystem Management principles.
For several years, many Federal agencies, including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, have been moving towards an Ecosystem Management approach to land and resource management. The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) is one such effort and perhaps represents one of the most visible and largest efforts to date. The implications of Ecosystem Management on the development and use of spatially explicit information systems are many and often complex. They are also not necessarily the same as those driving the development of traditional resource management information systems. This paper attempts to give the reader a basic understanding of Ecosystem Management principles and concepts and their implication on the development and use of data bases to be used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within the context of an ecosystem-based approach to natural resource management.
The ICBEMP covers approximately 144 million acres east of the Cascade Mountain range within the Columbia River basin. It covers landscapes as diverse as high elevation forest, sage steppe prairie, rich agricultural lands of the Palouse and urban centers such as Spokane, Washington and Boise, Idaho. It provides habitat for hundreds of terrestrial and aquatic species including a number of species listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act including wolverine, grizzly bear and several stocks of threatened anadromous salmon. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of people as diverse as the landscape and many of whom depend on the continued health of the ecosystems in which they live to provide for their livelihood. Concern for the health and sustainability of these diverse ecosystems has focused considerable attention on this area primarily because of issues such as salmon, forest health and range land reform.
The project was initiated at the conclusion of the effort resulting in the President's Forest Plan covering lands west of the Cascade Mountains which provide habitat for the Northern spotted owl and other old-growth dependent species. The President charged the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to take the lead in developing a scientifically sound and ecosystem-based plan for managing federal lands within the Columbia River Basin. A team of scientists, resource specialists, planners and analysts was formed in response to that direction in October of 1993 with most work expected to be completed later this year. There are three primary teams organized under this project including the Science Integration Team (SIT), the Eastside Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Team charged with developing management alternatives for the portion of the basin in Oregon and Washington and the Upper Columbia River Basin EIS Team charged with producing management alternatives for the remainder of the project area. The SIT is charged with producing three products: a Framework document which describes an ecosystem-based approach for the basin; an assessment of past, current, and potential future conditions of the Columbia Basin; and a scientific evaluation of management alternatives developed by the other teams. This paper primarily addresses the assessment work of the Science Integration Team and should apply broadly to land managers interested in developing ecosystem-based information systems.
An ecosystem can be defined as a naturally occurring, self-maintained system of varied living and non-living interacting parts that are self-organized into biophysical and social components (Golley 1994, Odum 1953, Slocumbe 1993). They are places where all plants, animals, soils, waters, climate, people, and processes of life interact as a whole. These ecosystems/places may be small, such as a rotting log, or large, such as a continent or the biosphere. The smaller ecosystems are subsets of the larger ecosystems; that is, a pond is a subset of a watershed, which is a subset of a landscape, and so forth. All ecosystems have flows of things, flows of organisms, energy, water, air, and nutrients moving within and through them. And all ecosystems change over space and time (Thomas 1956, Burgess and Sharpe 1981, Sugart 1984, Waring and Schlesinger 1985, Botkin 1990, Kimmins 1992). Therefore, it is not possible to draw a line around an ecosystem and mandate that it stay the same or stay in place for all time. The issue of whether people are part of the ecosystem, or external to it, is often the subject of debate. For the purpose of this paper, it is assumed they are and regardless, it is useful to characterize the people and social structures and to understand their interaction with ecosystems
The consequences of society's demands on natural resources may be reduced by increasing our understanding and consideration of ecological processes, including the role of biological diversity and natural disturbances in maintaining the health and resilience of ecosystems (Costanza and others 1992). Ecosystem Management therefore, can be described as the development of an integrated approach to managing the whole system rather than each of the component pieces. Ecosystems are the fundamental management units in ecosystem management (Salwasser and others 1993).
There are at least four broad principles useful in understanding ecosystem process and function. Consideration of these principles should aid in the development of information strategies and guide application development. These principles are:
1. Ecosystems are dynamic and evolutionary.
2. It is useful to view ecosystems as being organized within a hierarchy, each level having a variety of time and space scales.
3. Ecosystems have biophysical and social limits.
4. There are limits to the predictability of ecosystem patterns and processes; conditions and events may be predictable at some scales but not at others.
Change is inherent in ecosystems, they develop along many pathways (O'Neill and others 1986, Urban and others 1987). Disturbances that influence ecosystem condition are common causing changes in a nonlinear and discontinuous fashion. Ecosystems are the products of their history with fire, flood, pests, and human activities providing sources of disturbance (Agee 1994, Robbins and Wolf 1994). At times, management decisions have limited future options (Maser 1994, O'Laughlin and others 1993). And as ecosystems today are the product of disturbance and human activities, ecosystems of the future will result in part from the actions of the generation of today.
The implications of this principle are relatively straightforward though not necessarily easy to provide for in system design. Any ecosystem-based system should incorporate basic biophysical information such as those relating to geology, climate, landform, etc. This could range from the relatively simple with a few basic map coverages to very complex systems incorporating information on wind events, lightning strikes, geologic event likelihood maps, etc. These basic data should contribute to the basic understanding of ecosystem condition (i.e., why we have Lodgepole pine at one site and sage steppe at another). Models are also important in developing an understanding of ecosystem development. Nonlinear successional models, systems models and the like don't provide a replacement for observation but can help considerably in understanding both ecosystem development and future potentials.
Hierarchies are human constructs that help us understand complexity. Classification systems such as taxonomic systems help bring order to an otherwise, seemingly, unordered world. An important characteristic of a hierarchical system is the "whole/part" duality of it's components (Allen and Starr 1982, Allen and others 1984, Koestler 1967). That is, each level of the hierarchy is a discrete entity while part of a larger whole at the same time. Within each level of the hierarchy, environmental constraints, vegetative patterns, disturbance patterns and human activity exist (Pickett and others 1989, Robbins and Wolf 1994).
An ecosystem management approach should incorporate assessments at multiple scales. Assessments would look to the broad scale to define context and to the fine scale to define processes such that all assessments would look to two other scales, for context and process, as part of the assessment process. Spatial scales should match issues and decisions should recognize different temporal and spatial scales since decisions at one scale will likely affect other levels. An information strategy for an ecosystem-based approach should also be organized without particular regard to land ownership, this would allow land managers to better understand process and context than traditional systems which tend to focus on a particular ownership or jurisdiction. It would also encourage more collaborative efforts as well as broader participation in the planning process. This concept tends to be more controversial since non-participating land owners tend to be wary of others maintaining information covering their lands even though the intent is not to make decisions about those lands but rather to use the information to develop a better understanding of the entire landscape.
This principle is difficult to deal with given traditional data base design since both time and space are important and the end points are difficult to identify. That is, time scale could range from a year to thousands, even tens of thousands of years and spatial scales could range from very large to very small. There is the added difficulty of different scales relating to each other. Traditional efforts in building data bases for resource management have tended to focus on a single scale and generally represent a snapshot of conditions at a particular time. They have also tended to have defined spatial boundaries which may or may not be continuous such as a National Forest, District, County or a private or other public land ownership. Existing systems tend to focus on observable phenomena such as tree species or percentage of bare soil and less on processes and functions thus an ecosystem-based approach should consider factors not traditionally built into more traditional resource information system design.
The first two principles suggest that we need to think more broadly and develop systems that are dynamic, adaptable and span multiple scales of both time and space. A vegetation map developed at 1:24,000 using Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery should generally agree with a vegetative cover map developed from AVHRR satellite imagery with a resolution of one kilometer. Unfortunately, little effort has been put into reconciling disparate data within a scale much less for multiple scales and little, if any, effort has been put into developing strategies for a true multi-scale database design. Perhaps it is also time to put more effort into thinking about how ecological processes and functions can be better represented spatially as well. Ideally we would have a vegetation map coverage with a dynamic memory that would allow the movie camera to roll backwards and models to allow it to roll forward and visualization software to watch it all happen.
All ecosystems have limits; limits to the amount of biomass accumulation as well as the rate of accumulation and these limits impose limits on the type and amount of benefits society can derive from an ecosystem. These limits are constantly changing as environmental conditions change (i.e., climate). A particular limit may only represent one of several possible because of multiple developmental pathways (Kay 1991, McCune 1985). People can and have, at times, exceeded those biophysical limits (Robbins 1982, Young and Sparks 1985) yet society has the capacity to make decisions that allow society to live within those limits. An ecosystem management approach should consider intergenerational equity and tradeoffs (Quigley 1994). This suggests a need to look into the future much farther, perhaps hundreds of years, than traditional planning horizons of five or ten years.
A Western redceder given unlimited water and nutrients will not continue growing indefinately, physical limitations prevent it from growing 600 feet tall but it will grow taller than another redceder on a drier site. Information systems need the abiltiy to express the real biotic and abiotic limitations of ecosystems. Another implication is that we need to place additional emphasis on representing socio-economic information and cultivating the linkages between them. Water temperature in a stream in Northern Idaho affects salmonid survival which in turn affects commercial fishing in Coos Bay, Oregon which in turn affects foreign commercial fishing and so on. Systems models can help in exploring and defining these relationships and the affect of one limit on seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Events can be unpredictable (Holling 1986) and predictability varies on temporal, spatial and social scales. We can often predict some characteristics of events while others are unpredictable (Bourgeron and Jensen 1994). For example, on a given year with known climate patterns and forest conditions, it is possible to predict the amount of wildfire we can expect yet the size, intensity and location are not as easily predicted. Likewise, we can predict fairly accurately the number of emergency calls the 911 system for New York City will receive but would have no confidence in predicting whether a specific house would be one of them.
The implications of this principle suggest a need to carefully consider the conditions and events we wish to predict and monitor and to design for them. In doing so, considerable attention needs to be given to determining which scales of time and space are most appropriate for which ecosystem processes and functions. If long-term viability of a species such as Grizzly bear is an ecosystem management objective, we need to carefully plan an information strategy that responds to changes in the biophysical elements that affect the species continued viability. In this example, the assessment scale for the Grizzly bear would encompass the potential range of the bear, a fairly large land area with a likely mapping scale of 1:500,000 or perhaps smaller covering a region of the continent. In this scenario we might determine that it is necessary to look to an even larger land area to examine whether processes were at work that could affect the potential range over time (context) and the connections between suitable habitat within the range. Similarly, we should also look to a scale encompassing the home range of an individual to understand the patterns and conditions affecting a single individual (process). By doing this in an integrated system considering other ecosystem processes and functions, including social systems, would allow a more comprehensive look at the relative tradeoffs in managing one way over another.
Traditional resource inventories and mapping efforts, in general, have been functionally designed and executed. That is, the individual resource areas have historically funded, designed and executed data collection necessary for their particular purposes. Further, in a decentralized organization such as the Forest Service, inventory and monitoring funds are often distributed to field offices providing two potential sources of overlap and no effective means to ensure efficiency. An ecosystem-based inventory and mapping strategy would be multi-organizational and multi-value in design and have the following characteristics (USDA 1993, Quigley 1994):
Boundary neutral
Multiscale design
Dynamic - includes trends
Social, economic, biological and physical components.
Geographic information system and remote sensing technology
Quality control standards and processes
Cost efficient
More emphasis should probably be focused on organizations and the people who make up those organizations. Much of the above tends to run counter to organizational culture within some agencies including the Forest Service and may reflect human nature in general. Resource agencies tend to be decentralized with considerable discretion distributed to the field. Most field offices have been meeting their local needs for information for a long time and while there tends to be agreement that broader standards are needed, it often is based on an assumption that their existing data will meet the requirements. When it becomes evident that some data will need to be re-acquired, that agreement quickly fades. In other words, standards are fine so long as it's my standard. Ownership in a broader perspective appears to be difficult to achieve and this issue needs resolution before success can be realized in the implementation of an ecosystem-based information strategy.
Ecosystem Management as a process holds considerable promise in terms of developing a better understanding of the complexities of our natural world and how we relate to it. Yet there are substantial barriers to fully realizing that promise. One area that is critical concerns the development and use of information systems. It should not be left to resource professionals alone to face that challenge and it is incumbent on the information systems professionals to help lead the efforts needed to bring about strategies that meet the needs of resource managers. Key elements that should be addressed include the need for land based data as opposed to agency or owner based data, multi-organizational and multi-value inventory and mapping strategies, new methods for handling data at a variety of scales of both time and space, and more effective ways of dealing with organizational issues, agency culture and individual acceptance of standards, strategies and processes.
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