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This chapter continues to explain the concept of system context of Chapter 1 and 2 and addresses the question of what is the appropriate scale and attitude for management? Where should the system begin and end? The individual, the pack, the population? The tree, the stand, the region? And, what is a reasonable attitude for faunal system managers? The answer, as usual, is "it depends," and upon the perceived objectives. It also depends upon the limitations of the manager or student. These limitations are easy to list: time, skills, labor, budget, equipment, access or, in summary, the resources to do the work of analysis and design. It also depends on the willingness of the manager to take risks, to tolerate uncertainty. Taking a system approach to anything requires the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to live in a state of tentativeness. To do so seems intolerable to some people. The systems approach just exposes these needs and makes them a life principle for the faunal system manager, not something to be dreaded or suppressed.
To understand the decided context at a low level, the manager need only reflect on past schooling. Teachers either start with a tree and build up to the stand, then the forest, or they go in reverse sequence. They discuss a subsystem asking students to hold all questions about interactions and relations until later, i.e., until the next larger (or smaller) subsystem is discussed.
People who model, yo-yo on the string between full-scale world systems and biochemical models. The faunal system manager needs to realize:
The faunal system manager cannot model or manage the world. [World models have been created and improved ones are badly needed, but that is not the point here.] A decision needs to be reached about the subsystem to be used, but it is often imposed. Manage this state wildlife area! The thoughtful manager will work with adjacent landowners as quickly as with nesting birds on the area. When that decision is made to work with adjacent landowners, the subsystem has been expanded from the management area to some larger concept of the system of responsibility. Another manager will turn away from the boundary and focus on describing the biology of the deer population, often the most popular animal on such areas and the one producing the most revenue for the region (and the state agency). Which concept of the area or boundaries is best? Both are needed. Resources are limited; both can rarely be done. A decision is needed. The supervisor must provide direction (or at least evaluate the manager's decision). The answer depends ... on the factors listed above. The answer will be tentative, partially because it is uncertain and thus can be changed, partially because conditions and even objectives change. My view is that sub-optimal forest faunal systems will result more frequently from managers turning inward to smaller, interior systems than outward.
Forests
It is difficult to conceive of the forest and its global or national scale. Preliminary ideas were given in Chapter 1. It is essential to comprehend it as the spaces of fauna. It is also essential to understand the forces and currents that originate far from the site but that affect the animals and daily, local decisions. Areas in forests are as much a function of industrial development in the adjacent county as root development under the stand.
It is possible to measure land area that has trees. Land for management can be seen more clearly, more precisely, if ownership lines are included. Such measures usually reduces the amount that can be actively managed or which is protected.
There are now about 600 million acres (202 million ha) of commercial forest land in the U.S., a number which has stabilized since World War I (Clawson 1979). There have been massive tree cutting programs but also reversions of cropland to forests. Major changes are likely to occur locally, but the net effect is likely to be the same. There are many reasons for forests being stabilized including demand for wood (housing starts), quality of underlying land, cropland demand and farming costs, and transportation costs. Also there are new restrictions on and concerns for the way forests are used and the role they play. There are vast areas that are inoperable - too steep, too wet, too distant, etc. They contain trees, but costs and technology prevent them being harvested, even if the demand or market is available. Costs may change but, in general, the "good areas" have been harvested and replanted. The costly-to-harvest areas remain and the costs to grow trees and remove them, in general, are increasing. The "supply" is not the same as timber available. There are problems in how to report such data. Some genuine forested-area changes have occurred. Other changes, confounding analyses, are in the ways that data are collected and aggregated.
While employment of foresters and faunal system managers may increase, it seems unlikely that such employment would cause major changes in areas in forests or land productivity - optimistically, for 50 years. It now seems clear that, if conducted, high-intensity forestry on superior areas would equal or surpass by a 2 to 5 times (Farnum et al. 1983) the timber production now occurring on "commercial forest" areas. Where poor forest areas (low or non-profitable areas) are harvested, any money spent on regeneration (a centroid of forestry thought) is "wasted;" it is a suboptimal allocation of public or private funds.
As Clawson (1979) observed, changes in land use will be "... accompanied with more stresses and strains, public and private, than past shifts in land use." Forest faunal managers, once typically on their knees before foresters to "give them some land for wildlife," may see roles reversed. Under intensive forestry, fewer hectares will produce the demanded wood supplies. Much forest land is now inoperable or inaccessible; much is uneconomical to operate (stumpage value is zero); and because of stand patterns, some areas unsuitable for harvest, are cut anyway in a total operation because it makes sense to do so. With intensive forestry, smaller, carefully selected areas would be used. The others, submarginal, would be available for producing wildlife and the other benefit streams from the forests. This may create two new problems for the faunal manager: (1) how to stabilize certain species that depend upon the vegetation stage after timber harvest, and (2) how to meet the foresters' needs for protection from wildlife on intensively managed areas.
Area covered by trees does not tell much about the context of the forest faunal system. Trees grow, but the forester, like the faunal systems person, is interested in the population of trees and change over time. Net growth, the gains and the losses, is of interest. When the colonists arrived in the U.S., the net growth was probably zero. Now it is about 20 billion cubic feet per year. Many thousands of slow-growing acres with high mortality have been replaced by fewer acres of fast-growing young trees. Timber harvests cannot exceed net growth for long without depleting the inventory. Similarly growth cannot exceed harvest for long without stands stopping net growth (as in "old-growth" stands). Net timber growth is a function of timber harvest. Since animals are highly related to forest stand age, then time-since-harvest is the critical variable for the faunal manager and, as it turns out, to the forester. Time since harvest (or fire, etc.) is the basis for determining maximum mean annual increment or growth and it is the basis for deciding how to make the most money from cutting wood.
Tree growth, counterintuitively, is of secondary interest in forest analyses and in the decisions about when to cut a forest. The influential components of the equation are current inflation-adjusted interest rates, current costs (labor, energy, equipment, and road construction) and the prices to be received from sales of each species. Over-emphasis on tree physiology and growth leads to petty arguments in the field, mere skirmishes while the wars are won or agreements signed in distant boardrooms. The worth of any tree species changes with public taste and technology. "Knotty pine" may be valued today, unsalable tomorrow. "Rough" wood may be waste today, chipped tomorrow, and re-made into a fiber-aligned substance the next day. The worth of the identical wood with identical investment behind it may be very different in time and place. Increasingly, the value-added concept defines and refines the worth of wood. For example, wood is quick-sawn into furniture blanks almost on site. The product is not then cubic meters or board feet, some indiscriminate biomass, but a highly valued commodity with the cost of transporting waste wood left behind in the forest. Net annual growth indeed! Such measures are necessary but hardly sufficient as part of the land use decision making system for animals or wood.
As it turns out, annual growth currently exceeds annual harvest in the U.S. This varies greatly by area and species, but on the whole, young forests are growing rapidly and harvests efforts have slowed or stabilized (probably for the same reasons forest area has stabilized). The pressures are on to remove old-growth timber because of returns per unit invested and, locally, the low net-growth statistic produced by such groups of old trees does not look good on the records of aspiring young tree-stand managers.
The faunal system manager as well as forester must keep in mind that the worth of an average tree in a stand is stumpage. This is the value of the standing tree in the forest. The tree may have been produced by natural processes, but in the managed forest there are taxes, inventory, protection, and other costs of production of that standing tree that must be included in the stumpage estimate. Increasingly, the cost of minerals in the tree must be included, for these are production costs that were of zero value because of their apparent surplus. Now, on intensively managed sites (and I hold all forest sites), it is clear they must be replaced to gain growth in the future equivalent to that of the past.
Just as shipping and handling costs are part of most purchases, so stumpage is related. A tree that sells for $1000 at the mill but cost $600 to get it there has a stumpage value of less than $400. Sale price and handling costs, including interest rates on equipment and money, vary. The faunal system manager must realize his or her position nested within such a dynamic and stochastic system. One bewildering aspect of the position is that of the dominance of trees. The forest is a place of trees; dominant trees determine the name of the stand; trees produce wood; wood has a clear market value. Less clear (but why should clarity be a criterion in a world of non-market allocation decisions such as birth control, child care, public health, transportation, safety, welfare, and warfare?) are the other benefits from these areas that are conspicuously tree-covered.
No faunal system manager will be surprised in the future to realize that the real change in value of forest land (one concept of "production") to the owner is in the mean annual increment of land value. The forest land owner's greatest gains in many areas are in raw real estate value, not the trees thereon. The forest land owner, those who own 59 percent of commercial forest land, the non-industrial private owner, is largely a realtor, investing in land, and selling when the price is right within his or her investment portfolio. That trees are taken during this holding period is interesting, often pleasing, may provide extra income, and achieves certain social ends as well as cultural dogma like "keep land working." There should be no wonder that so many private landowners with so much area have so little interest in forest management (Alig, et al. 1990). Their interest is in escalating land values, not the dynamics of trees.
Land as forest land provides waterway protection (compute as engineering costs of projects to move water off of land with no more sediment than that from the present forest); water storage (compute as cost of tanks to store the equivalent water that percolates into forest aquifers and is used directly by humans); recreational hours spent (compute, minimally, as expressed willingness to pay or foregone worth of a vacation home or site); temperature amelioration (compute as local costs of extra air conditioning or heating when temperature is 3 degrees hotter in summer and colder in winter). There will be more about faunal, floral, and wilderness benefits later.
In summary, the forested hectare is valuable to people, whether they know it or not. It is usually valuable to the owner, without consideration of the wood growth thereon. Land, the mappable unit, is the ultimate commodity. The owner may exercise intensive tree management, or a comprehensive integrated system of profit production from wood, dispersed recreation, watershed protection, game, fish, minerals, grazing forage, shooting ranges, and research. Profit from wood pales before the potentials of the integrated system that includes changing net land value and sale at the optimum time. Wood harvest is a smoke screen (not by intent but by ignorance) in the battle for more rational long-term, profit- oriented, use of tree-covered lands.
Readers should not be mislead. The advantages and profits to be made from a total, integrated tree-related system, will not be achieved by wishing them. They will not exceed many other investments. They are one investment and they can be profitable. As for many other investments, they must be managed well. When little profit is assured, the system is at the margin. The manager, with hard work, can prevent suboptimization - can prevent the submarginal forest condition - public or private.
Ownership is not evenly distributed. There are about 62 million acres (25 million ha) in the U.S. in large private or industrial holdings. These are conspicuous targets for forest faunal system managers because of the area and animals controlled by individual or small-group decision makers. Large tracts, though private, have significant public dimensions (groundwater recharge, climatic effects, scenery (as it influences land values), recreational opportunity, research, and employment, to say nothing of species preservation in some cases). Macro management implies helping such groups to see the larger resource system; to stop thinking of themselves as forest products industries; and start to thinking of how to maximize profits and long-term corporate public relations benefits and tax reductions from operating the total system.
Vast areas once forested are now bare. Cutting followed by burning and grazing have created new environments. Without seed sources and altered climates, there can be no recovery to the original forest. Maintaining an early stage of succession (as is done by much farming in the U.S.) is not the issue. Total forest destruction and the destruction of the forest potential is.
Developing and debtor countries must continually "pay the bills." One resource by which to do so is wood. International debt, import and export barriers, wood prices, and the value of the dollar all affect the rate at which forests are cut and forest fauna affected. Sustaining area in forests is a high-priority macro-managerial imperative - to provide working wood and local firewood; to reduce deforestation impacts to climate, soil, floods, and groundwater; and to preserve certain fauna. The action probably lies in policy, organizations, laws, local options, and "marked wood" that is taken from a well-managed system. Because tropical forests differ so, it seems that a classification and priority for attention and strategic influence needs to be developed. The pressure for preservation and protecting forests needs to be expected. Much better would be pressure for management. The risks of failing may be great, but it can be instructive to evaluate the ecological catastrophes that have already resulted, presumably as a loss of forests. They are not as easily counted and depicted as the threats of future loss. The genetic losses need to be brought under control but the macro-managerial question becomes how: by threat of loss?...or population control?...or monetary equivalent?...or re-forestation?...or fuel wood substitutes?...or value-adding incentives for developing countries?...or banning the imports of certain tree species dominant in tropical forests?...or the next creative act.
Forests are often listed as the backbone of a region's economy or they are seen as its future potential. As regions develop, the very forest lands that produced early growth can be consumed - weakening the source. Economic stability is listed along with employment, purchases and sales of goods and services, and infrastructure development as beneficial factors for regions with a forest industry or its potential (Kromm 1972). The union of faunal resources of the forest with the traditional wood resource can help overcome the genuine limitations of a forestry- and wood-products based local economy. These limitations are:
There is a need for a managerial frame of mind, not unlike that of an engineer. Jacques Loeb in the late 1800's was early in bringing such a concept to biology (Pauly 1987). He is said to have lead in a tradition that placed more emphasis on controlling organisms than on formal, complete understanding of their lives.
The message of this chapter is easily misunderstood. There are massive institutional barriers to cross. There are well-supported models that need to be violated. The major problem to be confronted is the ease of thinking that a managerial frame of mind is in opposition to a scientific frame, or, more narrowly, anti-biological. Not an either/or decision, the decision is both/and. The emphasis herein is on management, on manipulation, on control. There may be "over"-emphasis, but if so, it is to counteract perceived, prevalent attitudes with over-emphasis on scientific reductionism, on analysis, and on system description.
Time
The manager of faunal systems in the forest must cultivate a thought process unlike that of any other natural resource manager, one quite unlike that of biologists and classical ecologists. It is an impossibly complex, multi-dimensional, simultaneous thought process with three time dimensions (not simply differences in magnitude along one dimension).
One temporal dimension requires thinking about annual birth and death processes and short generation periods.
Another dimension requires thought about periods in which habitats mature in 300 years. These are elements of geological thought (CAP625), said to be the primary reason why students of wild animals are required to learn about (contra "take courses in") geology. Such thought internalizes the ponderous nature of nature and climate over regions and anticipates vast, different conditions all heading toward a generally predictable final state. It matures skepticism and builds attitudes for accepting low confidence levels for explanations and predictions, approximate measures, and for constructing active, worldly mental simulation.
The third temporal dimension, barely one of magnitude, is one dealing with the sequences and periods between natural and human events. It deals with the evident but often-ignored situation in the field that event A before B will not have the same result as if B occurs before A (where A and B may be seed fall, fire, irrigation, fertilization, grazing, etc.). Part of the same temporal dimension is the awareness that event A followed by event B after 10 days may not have the same results as B 60 days after A. The manager using this temporal dimension is inclined to suspect that it, or the three-dimensions together (rather than the factors typically measured and manipulated), may have more influence on some system performance measure (e.g., grouse observed) than these factors, and it may account for more variability in a system's performance than any list of factors in a regression model. Another component of the third temporal dimension is the additive or subtractive (buffering) effects of sequential events and these will be discussed as cumulative influences in Chapter 16.
The faunal resource manager will usually deal with systems that have a distant time dimension. Forest systems have one of the longest time horizons with which systems analysts deal. It is so long that it requires a significantly different approach to decision making, requires different assumptions than used in making daily decisions. The context, at least along one dimension, is large. The relevant subsystem begins at a large scale.
Geology can help pull the human mind-set from the evolutionary expectation of 40-year ecological longevity outward to the 200-or-more-year mental patterns that are needed for managing forests or their fauna. (See CAP625.) Those patterns include dealing with physical changes during more than 50 years, knowing of one or more catastrophes or extreme events in such a period, and expecting some convergence of catastrophes, seriously considering the consequences of alternative investments - at least the parameters of interest rate and inflation, and expecting change in human attitude expressed as demand for forest products. These parameters, even a few of them, create people who function differently, think differently, significantly so, in society. This is not an excuse for them or a claim of a superior position for them, only to note the difference, because it can help explain actions and decisions, perhaps allow predictions for the future, and point to needs (1) to assure such patterns in all faunal system managers, and (2) to assure they all know the differences likely to exist between them and people with a short time perspective.
We learn from history that we do not learn from history. The forest faunal system manager needs to recognize the history of forestry and wildlife management for it can explain the present, reduce frustration over the rate of change, and perhaps illuminate differences that allow modern solutions to old problems. Game Management (Leopold 1933) was heralded as the beginning of that field, but there was much earlier action. Charles Elton and Herbert Stoddard influenced Leopold. Theodore Roosevelt (1910) had profound influence in creating the socio-political environment in which natural resource management made sense. E.P. Walker (1931), as assistant director of the National Zoological Park, wrote of urgency of wildlife protection and outlined need for wildlife protection, commercialization, and recreational use; spoke of "wild animal husbandry" (in my view a more precise phase than wildlife management), and described needs for analyzing carrying capacity, improving harvests and habitats, law enforcement, education, and administration. Trefethen (1961) and Gilbert and Dodd (1987), present comprehensive historical accounts, the basis for the temporal context of wildlife.
T.S. Palmer (1912) wrote of "game as a national resource" and described work with the major species. He emphasized four methods then used to increase game resources: protecting animals, establishing refuges and public hunting grounds, restocking depleted areas, and breeding animals on game farms. He described game data then collected by the states and advocated collecting data on hunters as well as game taken. He said, "More attention might be devoted to ascertaining the extent of the stock of game, which is the central point of interest of the whole game-protective machinery of the state." He noted that total revenue from license sales was $4,800,000 per year. In 1988 it was $330 million, and continues to increase gradually (1994).
Macro-Management
Most wildlife managers I have known and a few textbooks on the subject tend to emphasize direct actions in the field that will affect animal populations. This is understandable. People who love animals become educated and seek ways to help them. It is reasonable to expect such action. There is needed, however, a rapid evolution, almost a transition, from the animal lover to the resource system manager. That metamorphosis is spectacular to see when it occurs, and is an all-too-rare event. One transition is from a micro- to macro-scale manager.
A manager builds 100 nest boxes for owls and in the 6 months 4000 hectares of owl habitat in the same region are clear cut. The net gain? Where is the control over the performance of the system?
A judge overrides efforts to stop the building of a dam. At the sound of a gavel, 4000 hectares of superior wild turkey brood range are destroyed. The managerial gain; the future potentials? Where is the control?
A manager plants 100 hectares producing 600 pounds of forage per hectare. His deer eat 6 pound per day. He feeds 27 deer for a year. His supervisor recommends a new season and changes the harvest by 270 animals. Three hours spent in testimony about the season had many times more effect on the deer resource than a month spent in the field.
As an example of the expression of policy change needed, I cite Overton and Hunt (1974) who argued that use of the present-value criterion for making economic decisions in forestry is exploitative. They said
The application of present value...will lead to shorter and shorter rotations, to the point of depletion of the resource, and to the conversion of forest lands to other uses, until the relative price of forest products rises sufficiently high that the economic system is in equilibrium. This can never happen as long as we have inventories which can be cashed in; the push is to cut them as soon as possible, after which timber supply will be down, prices will go up and equilibrium will be established. But why not accomplish the same thing by declaring that existing old growth cannot be cut? Lumber prices will go up, we will reach an economic equilibrium, and still have an old growth. Without really advocating the latter, we can argue that it is just as feasible as the way we are going.(See CAP5016.)
A change in tariffs and export quotas reached in international conference and Congressional committees allows much more wood to be moved out of the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Other action (e.g., related to the spotted owl) reduce cutting of large trees. Following cuts, deer, elk and moose browse increases and these populations increase in response to the new, abundant food supplies. Tree harvests in the southeastern U.S. shift in response to northwestern production and so too do deer harvests there. Did the wildlife manager cause the changes? Not the typical manager making small cuts in forests, seeding food plots, encouraging farmers to leave this or that plant, suggesting this cutting pattern over that! The real manager may realize that he or she has been a victim of some extra-system force. Similarly he or she may have missed an opportunity for craftily and strategically causing desired resource change. The scale is different; the perspective is distorted as by a prism, not a far-seeing lens.
A judge's decision to allow work on a dam, or to allow a powerline to proceed, can effect wildlife forever. The motive is irrelevant to the animals. A railroad strike, a shift in housing-starts, invention of technology that allows more wood to be extracted, improved road building equipment, changes in land value, shifts in fiberboard and paper technology, harvest delays (e.g., injunctions) all influence wildlife harvests and production. They are seemingly a part of "other systems", not really faunal system management. I contend that they are very much a part of the system and more people need to participate in these activities directly for the purpose of making faunal system gains. When the massive, significant changes that occur in wildlife populations are left to someone else, there is little wonder that the people flitting around at seemingly trivial tasks are judged as trivial. The scale of work is significantly different enough for the phrases micro- and macro-management to be used.
The faunal resource manager must continually ask about the proper scale at which to work. Questioning should begin at a macro scale, seeking where the manager can be most influential given his or her personal resources (e.g., social skills, intellect, physical abilities, educational investment, life expectancy). "Influential" sounds vague but means: significant control over some major dimension of the faunal resource system.
The difference in this macro view from a conventional view is that what a person does, does not have to have been previously called wildlife management. The systems person sees the objective as foremost. Let us assume there is some objective described and called Q*. The system person wants, as a result of his or her action, Qt+1, or the condition of the system in the next realistic time period to match up well with Q*. It would be a perfect condition if they were equal. The manager is working to change Qt+1 to Q*. The means do not matter! For some people, the means may be illegal or immoral; for others, there are imposed constraints, but the point is that for the system manager, the ends, the objectives, are important. Whether someone knows that a wildlife manager is at work makes no difference. Whether techniques used are in The Wildlife Management Techniques Manual makes no difference. Questions of the new manager are away from acceptable practice and conventional wisdom and directed to what methods, procedures techniques - any actions - that will result in system performance at a much higher level at the lowest reasonable cost.
Of course, everyone does not have to drop their hammer and pick up a briefcase to troop off into some macro-managerial world. A mix is needed, but from my perspective, there is not enough macro-management, not enough support for those so engaged, not enough analyses to see the need and to at least realize why wildlife systems are not under better control. Such realizations will reduce the frustrations of the field manager. The message here is easily confused. There is no need to choose up sides, "those micros against us macros"; no need to think less of some actions than others. The need is to conceive of the system, see that human benefits are desired, analyze the factors to which these benefits most sensitively respond, and then to get busy working with them.
Macro-Examples
Examples of the macro-scale factors with which the faunal resource manager may work in each of the components of systems theory are:
The Meta-Agency
Although various resource organizations exist and differ greatly even though named similarly, there is clear need for improved coordination among them. Grouping nominal bodies together under one banner like environmental agency does not cause coordination, cooperation, or increased efficiency. It can help; some improvements have resulted from such grouping, but the experiments have been very costly and the results do not provide for confidence in decisions about organizing agencies. The concept of a vastly complex, highly inter-related group of natural resource and environmental interests is now well known. How to improve the linkages remains unknown or at least unemployed. The macro-scale manager may conceive of ways to increase relations, to create nodes to which information flows, to improve trade-offs. Not a mega- but a meta-agency is needed, a separate net or layer of connecting structures and processes among the existing agencies. No wars need be fought among agencies, nothing need be dismembered, no risks faced in violating the fundamental law that bureaucrats seek to maximize bureau budgets. The meta-agency would operate by sharing information, trading it in most cases. It might include a shared computer, unifying software, state- or regional-scale simulation models, and public reports of performance measures both for the individual agency as well as for the combined activity.
Efforts to promote and build into practice centralized federal policies and laws are clearly a macro-management activity in the U.S. and other regions. Debatable, the arguments for centralized faunal work are:
There are disadvantages to centralized work, thus the cyclic nature of decentralization. I am not so naive as to think centralization will occur rapidly or totally in this highly state-oriented area of work. New faunally-related enterprises (Giles and Nielsen, 1990) that ignore state lines will show some of the absurdities and diseconomies of the present practice. The major disadvantage of centralization is that single standards are imposed on situations that differ substantially. The counter plea is to let each do its own work to accommodate these differences. The alternative that will become more evident through this book is that the standard needed is a process - computer systems that calculate local needs based on local variables then selection of those that miximize regional objectives. No universal, simplistic criterion is to be used like "close the season on species X" or "take 30% of the population." The standard is the algorithm that uses local data, uniformly, to determine the legal or policy-based action that takes into account many factors.
Precision of Objectives
Only continual pressure will result in objectives being set. See Chapter 4. Only great pressure will result in them being stated precisely. Because all aspects of a managed system are dependent upon objectives, work with them will interpenetrate all other parts of the system. Not entirely facetiously, it can be said that once a change is wrought in objectives, the manager can then sit back and watch the rest of the system work.
Imagine the difference in a program of activities that would be associated with changing a simple objective like "to maximize the deer herd" to "to maximize the average annual total amount of harvested deer flesh that is consumed by people." Discussions leading to such an objective would undoubtedly be long and tedious but combine the desires for a large harvest, much quality deer flesh per carcass, minimum waste, a reasonable combination, all over many years. The objective would pull management toward sex and age structures that balance productivity and proportion of carcass weight as consumable flesh, then would promote humane, skillful harvest, and also proper care, storage, and cooking of meat. Educational work on improving objectives can release a creative flow of action options as well as allow the managerial imperative to be translated into meaningful measures of system performance. "Preserving ecosystems" is too vague for an objective. Ecosystem functions can be quantified and translated into objectives. These functions include absorpting and breaking down pollutants, cycling of nutrients, binding of soil, composing organic waste, maintaining a balance of gases in the air, regulating the radiation balance and climate, and fixing solar energy. Similar functional roles of wildlife with their values can undoubtedly be used in justifying management.
An Information System
Opposing one after another ill-advised or illegal wildlife-destructive development project can become tiring as well as boring for the manager. It can also uncover future plans. A project being opposed is usually only one of a planned set. Looming behind a potentially successful blockage of a bad project is a platoon of similar projects, each needing analysis and, if necessary, efforts to have them revised or aborted. The future looms tiresome; there can appear to be only negative or defensive work ahead, no energy surplus for creativity or gains.
Having had this experience of opposing a very bad project (with more in the wings), I sought to develop a statewide information system. At least each new challenge such as a dam, a highway, an airport (Koeln 1980), a powerline (Smart 1976, Jones 1977) could be quickly studied and preliminary impact analyses performed. To meet each challenge with novel analyses in a timely and cost effective way was and remains impossible. At least a regional information system is needed.
Incentives and Substitutes
Laws are one means to the ends of faunal resource development and management. Laws impose high costs on society, in passage, enforcement, litigation, and collecting penalties. It may be more cost effective to conceive of another strategy to achieve the same end. For example, I have only a rough hypothesis that a wildlife law enforcement officer's work with a community development group, union, and welfare department would reduce substantially the major out-of-season, non-commercial game and fish law violations. Incentives and substitutes may replace penalties and deterrence.
Taxes
That tariffs can be influenced by managers was mentioned above. In some areas, property taxes are adjusted based on current use. Where property taxes rise rapidly, agricultural and forest lands cannot be maintained in these uses by financially strapped landowners. "Current-use assessment" is a tax strategy that allows a farmer or woodlot owner to retain these uses. A wildlife manager courts rejection by asking a financially-stressed farmer, one paying more taxes on land than it can possibly produce in profit, to preserve a forest for its benefits to late-stage forest animals. An alternative, macro-scale strategy is for wildlife managers, some special group of them, to promote taxes that allow or encourage landowners (singly, but preferably within groups because of economies of scale and timber rotation) to retain forests and to manage them well for multiple benefits. Other resource-related enterprise work can move the landowner past the poverty line and can thereby allow decisions that may benefit faunal populations and related human benefits.
A related tax strategy to be employed is that of improving death taxes. A person having created a wonderful wildlife habitat may die and that life work may have to be destroyed by timber sale or other liquidation to pay death or estate taxes. A wildlife manager promoting rational death tax policy can have a profound impact on millions of hectares of forest wildlife habitat over many decades. (See Waldon et al. 1987).
Interest Rate
As will be discussed in Chapter 4, one type of objective treats the criterion used to judge success. The most familiar is the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio. An objective might be to increase the B/C ratio. This objective has limitations, but there are alternatives to it. Macro-managerial efforts will tend to move agencies and their leaders away from such an objective, past a high-internal-rate-of-return criterion (Gansner and Larsen 1969), and on to the present-net-value as a means to judge how best to allocate their limited funds for providing power to forest faunal systems.
A manager, by working with the present net value criterion, getting it understood and properly entrenched in computer programs, decision aids, and patterns of thought, can be very influential to the domain of resource concern - many people, large areas, and long periods.
The time for an investment is of more concern in forest environments than others. To plant a tree implies some well-conceived future, probably at least 20 years and usually more than 40. To compute the difference between putting investment money in a bank or into a tree plantation or a wildlife food orchard, it is rational to discount the probable returns to the present to see which will be the best investment. To make such judgments wisely requires more knowledge of investment systems than held by the average wildlife manager or provided in the average economics class, not mastered by many aspiring wildlife managers. The investment decision includes the investor's objectives for sources of income, uncertainty and the consequences of failures, reinvestment options for income from several sources, and the selection of a discount (or interest) rate.
Fluctuations in bank interest rates are commonplace and well known. Estimating such rates for a long period is very difficult, and as even simple experiments will disclose (CAP99), the choice of an option is very, very sensitive to the interest rate chosen.
Overton and Hunt (1974) complained of the indiscriminate application of economic formulae to forest problems. The new role suggested here is leadership in discriminating use of the formulae. One of the elements of such formulae to which the results is most sensitive is the interest rate - and that is a human decision, not found by some biologist's search through the woods.
The macro-manager will assist mightily in helping decision makers understand the influence of interest rate, that it changes over average timber rotations, that equations using such rates can be written with constraints, and that several equal present-value net results can be gotten with different interest rates over a long period.
"Economics" or "economic considerations7quot; are often criticized as overpowering in faunal resource decisions. I suggest this starts with a fundamental misunderstanding and misuse of "economics." Conceived not as financial analyses or "money management" but as "the study and use of the knowledge of allocating scarce resources among competing alternatives", it becomes central to faunal system management.
The faunal system manager may help in clarifying objectives and may thereby seek to unify all benefits into a common expression. That expression may be money, but that is a weak unit for it is not constant among investors and differs greatly between private, corporate, and public investors. The macro-manager needs to "light-up the place" for, as the joke goes about the man searching at night for a lost item, "It wasn't lost here but this is where the street light is!" There are commonplace monetary equations. The place is well lit by them. The economic equations and the concepts they represent for allocating resources for people today and perpetuating not only cash flows but benefits enjoyed today need to be articulated well, then used in systems.
Promotion and Salary
"We must improve" says the micro manager. The macro manager works to improve the system by which all state and agency faunal agency personnel are promoted and the procedures for improving salary increases. Anticipating a future war with salaried employees in related agencies, the manager may begin work at a higher level than the agency.
Many people perform well because of the love of the resource and their dedication to the wildlife cause. They are part of a calling; they have a vocation. Many others do not. Salaries and status are means by which almost all staff can be kept on a course toward objectives. One change that might be implemented would be to create position titles and new roles into which a manager may move. Wildlife agency career ladders are notoriously short. There are only a few rungs. All employees seeking to advance wait for the death of someone in a top position. A shift in perspective to a circular agency (Ackoff 1974) with opportunities to move to areas of new responsibility (e.g., Forest Toxicology Specialist; Chief of the Econometrics Group; Leader of the Crypozoan Taskforce) can be very effective. Modest salary changes may be appropriate, but the manager must not discount the importance of recognition, status, novelty of experience, and new opportunities sought by many to test themselves and demonstrate their ability.
Salary change is now based on performance criteria in many organizations. The limitation is usually that tasks performed or work done is rarely related to gains made or benefits produced. These are often difficult to link but since much management is a team effort, should not the team (the entire team - from janitor to leader) benefit in proportion to the objectives achieved?
In a faunal system business with feedback operational, a subunit (say the forest and farm pond unit) might share annual profits, 60% based on the profits of the total enterprise, 40% based on the profits directly related to the pond work. Direct work is rewarded; the more the better, but the enhancement of the total business over the long run is the objective and self-serving, individualistic, competitive action is maintained but kept in proper proportion to sustained total group performance.
Bonuses and special awards should never be overlooked as means to move performance ahead. Forest faunal systems include animals, forests, land, users ... and the managerial staff. It is strange how little attention to such a major system component is given in school, texts, conferences, and continuing education programs.
Futures Conference
If a futures conference (one examining the future of society, the agency, the faunal enterprises, or the resource) generates discussion in the field and if it causes shifts in information collected, research performed, or where newly hired staff are located, then it evidently causes change in the way animals are managed. The change is usually over an extended period, area, time, and group of users. Such a conference, if it causes change, can be viewed as feedforward.
Keepers: The Oversight Function
Though strong and crafty, a fox is not the most desirable candidate for the keeper of chickens. There are needs for "keepers" in all parts of society. Selecting the best types of keepers is a very important task. In the U.S., citizens have been busy getting things moving, inventing, starting. Now is a time for maintaining and stabilizing. The costs of doing so are always surprising. In the wildlife area this is particularly true. It is now time for some keepers. The keeper function is very important; it is almost missing within the wildlife agencies.
Throughout the U.S. there are commissions that are responsible for the wildlife agencies. These are usually appointed roles and while they are supposed to be a kind of citizen's board, they quickly become defensive, and even dabble in the day-to-day management of the agency. It becomes "my agency" and a kind of rah-rah "we want to become the best agency in the country" spirit takes over. Some commissioners have been placed by politicians to shake things up or to "get that group back on track" but they are quickly and easily brought into the fold ... or tolerated until they leave ... which they inevitably do. Even two aspirin will not cure their all-too-frequent head-against-the-stonewall pain.
One aspect of the oversight function is the individual who analyzes situations and calls for change (cf. Overton and Hunt 1974 or Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics). Groups are important because individuals are often at extreme risk in pointing to weaknesses or needed change. (Fearful people interpret new ideas or suggestions as criticism of past practices. Fearful people often try to "get even.") Private groups can be effective in protecting individuals, but they can be powerful in pooling knowledge and may be the only way pressure for change can be sustained. Most bureaucracies realize the low budgets and energy of private groups and waiting for them to go away, rather than changing, is their reasonable strategy.
What is needed is a keeper agency, an auditor. It needs to be outside of the wildlife agency. The agencies are populated with an incredibly moral bunch of very altruistic people, generally working very hard and long hours for, relatively-speaking, low wages. Altruism cannot prevent some blindness occurring, and it will not assure maximum system effectiveness. In systems groups, when such situations occur, it is said that feedbacks are needed. The wildlife agency money is audited by state and federal staff. The managerial actions are under scrutiny by in-house groups, professional societies (e.g., certification of wildlifers by The Wildlife Society), and federal inspectors (where monies of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are involved). Yet, nowhere is there an outside group (perhaps no more than 2 people with assistants) that monitors the results of all of this work and money and staff commitment and (1) reports it, and (2) pulls the lever or blows the whistle when a threshold of badness, or incompetence, or species endangerment is passed.
The Government Accounting Office (GAO) looks at all federal expenditures and so rarely gets around to a small program in a big Department of the Interior. In 1981 it did look (GAO 1981) and found the wildlife agency needed:
In a sweeping recommendation, reflecting the needs addressed in this book, the GAO recommended that all land-use agencies "... give greater emphasis to conserving and managing fish and wildlife." GAO (1981:52) observed that even after mixed reaction to this recommendation they believed one agency (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) "needs to take the lead role in deciding how animals should be managed by other agencies." Perhaps. The needs are too great, objectives too diverse among agencies, resources too limited, and the concepts of this book are not in place in that agency ... or anywhere else ... sufficiently to provide any assurances of significant improvements. Superior faunal resource managers operating superior systems in unique situations are the real needs.
Conflict
Advocates of "nature knows best" and those entrapped by fear of the undesirable secondary effects of managerial acts are all around. There are people opposed to hunting and trapping; to beavers flooding roads and deer changing the distribution of tree species in forests; to tree cutting; to wet-land drainage; to lake building. Every act has a potentially opposing act and secondary consequences. Humans have changed ecosystems world wide for 10,000 years, some longer. There are no "natural" areas and "since the beginning" never have been. There are only areas more disturbed by people than other areas. Deciding where is the best location along a continuum of disturbance is a question worthy of the best minds, the most rational dialog, and the most humane social processes. There is a location on the continuum to be decided and achieved by the manager. That location is tentative and will change with changes in one or more dominant factors. The quiet of the resource night can be shattered by changes far removed from the forests and their animals. A balance between animal food and tree harvests can be upset by new technology replacing (or increasing) wood demand. Discovering a disease within a species may destroy the public demand for that species. The faunal system to be managed is always potentially changing, not only because of the animals themselves, but also because of the many changing dimensions of the total system - the conflict cross currents. The managerial attitude is built on the awareness of these currents, as well as other concepts such as risk-taking.
Risk Taking
Because of the innate, changing conflicts, the managerial requirements are very specific. There must be risk taking. There must be decisions. There must be action. Defeats are normal; expected. Success is measured as merely "greater than 50 percent." Lack of knowledge can rarely be the basis for indecision any more than it can be for the physician or engineer. Faunal system decisions, with rare exception for the truly enormous project, are made in a very timely manner. Adjustments are usually possible later just as doctors adjust their treatment of human patients. The computer goes through a looping procedure as one of its powerful feats. Iterative is the word often used. The manager also is engaged in an iterative operation, at least annually, for many of the same actions and events occur. The thoughtful manager adjusts at each iteration. Monitoring as well as corrective action is expected. As in few other fields, the expansiveness of the range of decisions is vast. The range is from simple decisions about how to respond to a letter of inquiry to whether to allow harvesting of trees over 250 years old on a wildlife area.
Let me repeat and emphasize, so that there are no mistakes in understanding, that faunal resource management is not "wildlife biology" or "wildlife ecology" and certainly not "conservation biology." Managers must know biology, but also 25 other topics of equal or greater importance equally well. Why emphasize biology? The manager must know ecology but why the emphasis? The emphasis should at least be on the equality of the topics and the location of any problem or project within the conceptual space of the 5 Es: economics, ecology, energetics, esthetics, and enforcement. Failure to account for all simultaneously is to ignore a potential enemy; to risk a means of failing.
Managing forest game without good knowledge of the population itself (or without surrogate expressions such as forage or birth rates), mortality, crippling loss, or removal by hunters leaves the manager with a condition difficult to conceive as one being "managed." Nevertheless, it is possible; the manager's confidence swells with information, the risks decrease. The practice is conservative and incremental, year after year. A reasonable approach is to use a set of outer-bound assumptions, then to use an index. For example, by using an approximate birth rate, awareness of the gross large populations, and tendencies of hunters, an upper limit on the proportion of females (e.g., 0.3) in the annual harvest can be estimated. Total harvest (adjusted for hunters, weather, season length, permits, etc.) can be plotted over the proportion of females in the harvest. Changes in permits, season length, etc. can be used to make adjustments in the final population. Complex population simulators can be used to augment such gross decision criteria as the proportion of females in the harvest. With each incremental improvement, risks are reduced.
Investigative
The forest faunal system manager has an investigative frame of mind, not a research frame. The difference in the two is often overlooked, or the investigative frame of mind is suppressed in the graduate programs of students. These programs, with no clear exceptions, are involved in conventional, publishable, fundable, reviewable studies largely because of their context, partially because of the belief that faunal resource managers need to master science. They do, but they also need to master several other whole domains of knowledge and how knowledge is gained and they must transpose a "classical research" paradigm, largely unaided, into the realm of resource management where much more than investigation-informed action has meaning. Managers need scientific studies, but they rarely can do them. They use them, but they rarely can access the ones they need. Managers need a scientific pattern of thought (but a systems approach is a viable replacement option). They need scientific skepticism. They need to know the limits of confidence, the concepts of controlled studies, the power of taxonomy, the preciseness of description, the inductive-deductive dialectic. However, these lists are neither enough nor do they themselves constitute an appropriate paradigm for faunal resource management. The investigative approach is not bad, only insufficient and biased. The bias is toward inductive research, a valuable, essential part of the resource management system, a part needing the very best scientists. It is a part, but not the whole.
Simultaneity
Researchers attempt to control a system, to vary one factor, to observe the results. Faunal systems are largely uncontrollable; it is irrational to act as if they can be. Only limited "statistical control" can be gained with reasonable resources over faunal systems. Faunal systems have too many potentially significant factors to be controlled. There is not enough time, money, or talent to iteratively change each factor over a range of values, then all in pairs, then key factors in combinations. There are few similar ecosystems. Each is probably unique. The ecologist's rule: you can never do just one thing, is unmistakable. The manager, typically, is not engaged in controlled or treated-untreated studies but in developing and using "black-box theory", attempting to understand systems in as many ways as possible but at some stage realizing the processes cannot be fathomed and that they, collectively (i.e., the unknown workings within a hypothetical "black box"), can be, must be, deduced from input, output, and feedback relationships. To act as if all processes can be learned and their relationships described and a nearly-deterministic system created is also irrational. Do rational people pursue irrational ends?
Effective managers never have opportunities to study sequentially the effect of factors on a faunal system. Some attempt to do so in the grand tradition of university research. This is a sequential strategy. Managers need to make several actions simultaneously.
A strategy composed of several tactics is to be selected. Habitat is changed: simultaneously news and education accompany the act; simultaneously ground work is begun for changing harvest regulations.
The population-people-faunal space threesome is used simultaneously. The manager, faced with an apparent need to double a food supply, will ask, perhaps act on: "perhaps I can reduce the population by one-half and change the users' success rate to achieve the same end?"
Synergism
One potential effect of taking simultaneous actions is that they may results in synergism, the observation (Chapter 2) that a system achieves more than the expected results from a sum of the inputs. The causes of synergism are an area for study. They are possible through (a) energy released or economy gained by ideas, (b) creative expression resulting in well-lead committee action, (c) sharing resources (e.g., a computer used by several groups), (d) a solution for one problem transformed into that for another, (e) blocking action, allowing expression of an existing resource, and (f) simple improved arrangement (e.g., evident in the effects of changing land use patterns (i.e., the same area in a set number of uses and arrangements) on some animal populations, in office furniture on staff performance, and in the effect of changing location of agents and agency offices on enforcement effectiveness).
Megafactors
"Which is more important, the heart or lungs?" is a leading question. The need for the animal system is clearly both. Interesting to discuss and relevant to the physiologist, the question can lead people away from the totality of systems, the commonness of roles within them, the utter dependence of all parts of each other, and away from ideas of relationships.
Biologists have long recognized the concept of the limiting factor. Analytically useful, this concept is that there is some one factor or substance (e.g., a nutrient) that is in such short supply that a population or organism is prevented from growing or even caused (allowed?) to die. It has ruled wildlife management thought for over 50 years. Useful, it is suboptimal. The manager seeking to increase some species, e.g., ruffed grouse, seeks the limiting factor. Perhaps it is winter food, nest predators, or lack of dusting areas. Perhaps it is ...? find the limiting factor! Remove that limitation (e.g., planting food producing plants), then work on the next-most-limiting factor. It makes sense. However, it denies the essential managerial frame of mind for simultaneous actions, for synergistic results, and the very nature of functioning whole systems.
I have always found it interesting that most animals die of suffocation. I still do. This is the reductionist's results. An animal may have a massive nematode infestation. A weakened condition results, near starvation, pneumonia results and the animal dies of lung pathology - suffocation. From what did the animal die? Was the cause infection with parasite eggs, the parasites themselves, starvation, penumococci, insufficient oxygen to some small neutral system? The animal died with parasites; it died of suffocation ... but why or from what remains a question. The role of the limiting factor paradigm for management is now passé, replaced by a system of many factors acting together - some neutral, some potentiating, some antagonistic.
If life of the system is the performance measure, it can be gained in many different degrees and levels. It can be achieved down many different pathways for there is equifinality, life itself. Death seems to be a singular, unique condition. The "law of the minimum", the concept of a limiting factor, needs to be laid aside as an interesting, sometimes useful, tool in the manager's kit.
An alternative is found in the work of system analysis called "sensitivity analysis." Large models are created. The factor to which the system performance measure (the objective or some index to or expression of it) is most sensitive can be found. The manager is usually seeking an answer to what small changes in what factor will result in large changes in the way the system works? Often, these are factors over which the manager has little or no control (e.g., precipitation, but by knowledge of the distribution of normal precipitation, managers can select sites more (or less) dry to meet specific needs). When the factor to which the system is very sensitive and it is one that can be controlled (e.g., by applying lime to increase pH) it is useful to call it a megafactor, the major handle or knob in controlling the destination of the system.
Simulation
Computer simulations are well known (Starfield and Bleloch 1986), but underlying the technology is a "what if I do X, then what will be the consequences?" inquisitive frame of mind. Computer simulations are best used when objectives are not clear. When clear, some optimization method is recommended to replace simulation. In faunal systems work, objectives are rarely clear and, if so, are likely to be dynamic. Simulations seem desirable but they have limitations and disadvantages. The technology or methodology is not the emphasis here, only the mental pattern. The manager needs to develop a limited simulation pattern of thought. In concert with the investigative and simultaneous patterns, the good manager, planning to take some action (a project, program, development, etc.), begins to ask "what if I do X; what will be the consequences?" and to prepare for answers. The results of these questions and their answers can be conceived as a consequence table. Action A will result in these changes in species A, in erosion rates, in peak flows, in stream organisms of type B, in forest site index, in human use rates, in width of a zone of influence, in disease hosts and vectors, in... Comparing Action A with any other action presumably will be done in the same terms as for A. The problem usually is that, given all these analyses (no matter how crudely done, e.g., plus, minus, neutral, and unknown), the best action cannot be determined because the various consequences have not been formulated as objectives or their relative importance specified. The consequences may be "known" but unless "desired consequences", the objectives, can be stated, the selection cannot be made.
However, selections are made! The manager assigns personal weights of importance, or scores on the basis of perceived public desires and "political" pressures. The manager also selects (or eliminates potential action) on the basis of any one very bad consequence. (Rarely will a net benefit analysis prevail; avoidance of a conflict or protracted litigation will usually be grounds for excluding an action.) Rarely do people who do analyses of those managers making simulation-based decisions realize that the list of categories in a consequence table is a list of "relevant topics", thus topics of interest, thus topics of potential human importance, thus items with value, thus an area that is at least a nominal objective. All possible consequences of an action are not listed. They rarely can be listed in real time. A select list is made. That list invariably has the important topics, the interesting or key results. To estimate the amount of erosion likely to be produced from a forest road built for hunters is suggestive that erosion is of interest and that it eventually might be formulated as an objective such as "to minimize or stabilize the stream sediment load 30 m below the road center line at or below the pre-road condition load." Not just a concept of "erosion is bad", this formulation suggests measurement criteria, a non-arbitrary standard, and tolerable conditions. Erosion may be "bad" from several perspectives (e.g., coastal river dredging costs, water treatment costs, evidence of nutrient loss). Each of these may be formulated as objectives as the system manager moves away from the gross physical measurement of the consequences of Action A to erosion. The faunal system manager may seek to stabilize caddis fly larvae populations (which cannot be done if erosion rates are high). Measurement of caddis fly larvae may not be feasible; it may be too costly; enough support for halting erosion to care for caddis flies may not come from caddis fly lovers. Thus, "erosion" may be the consequence of importance, the aggregate banner under which several interest groups may assemble with the manager.
One of the manager's dialectics is between how to be right tomorrow and how many times can he or she be wrong within an epoc? From the Pleistocene to the Present? The forest faunal system manager's thoughts, unlike those of the farmer, wetland manager, or range manager must have a minimum century-base. The manager acts on the land, setting in motion patterns and pathways for a hundred years. Creating opportunity-space is the manager's task. Too many unpredictable event sequences are possible in the manager's created future. A poacher, a predator, a powerline can all interrupt and change the annual events within the pattern, but not the pattern. Using computer simulation, many different combinations of such events can be studied. By using a process that selects events at random (e.g., a 2-inch rainfall this run, 0.7 inch on another run; slight poaching this year, heavy on another run of the simulation) most of the realistic states of a system can be considered. This is called stochastic simulation. The good manager's attention is always given to objectives (Fig. 3.1),
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| Fig. 3.1. Objectives for a system can usually be expressed as one or more integrative performance measures, Q*. Not always "to increase," objectives may be net expressions or even "to decrease." Here an objective is expressed as increasing to, then stabilizing past 2010 AD. |
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| Fig. 3.2. Objectives are often discussed and formulated (at time B) based on desirable or optimum conditions perceived in the past (time A). Because objectives are stated does not mean that improvements will come about or that conditions will change. Management can usually reduce the deficit or slow its rate. |
True Additions
One of the more difficult components of the managerial attitude is that of the true addition of benefits resulting directly from management. If a forest normally can produce a harvest of 100 grouse and after a manager's work, it can and does produce a harvest of 100 grouse, then there has been no managerial influence. If the manager brags of a harvest of 110 birds, that may be true, but the manager's measure is only in the true additional birds (over those expected from the system without the manager) produced, namely 10. If the objective was 100, even the 10 may not be legitimately reported as managerial influence (for why were not resources allocated elsewhere and a surplus avoided?).
The above is a commentary on net additional benefits as in fundamental marginal analysis in classical economic studies. If a population of 200 forest pest species is likely to decline to 180 due to succession-caused changes in available food supplies, the reduction in the pest or its influence cannot be claimed (appropriately) by the manager. It has (and will be), but the managerial mind will concentrate on desired true additional (net) change per unit of investment.
Suboptimization
When objectives are stated, then an index to how well they are achieved can usually be developed. How rough or precise is not the point; one can be developed. Such indexes are called system performance measures. Often they can never be totally achieved. A theoretical score, like engine efficiency of 100%, can be conceived but probably never achieved. This makes no difference to the manager. The manager, satisfied after feedback, that the performance measure is ethically, computationally, and otherwise sound, uses it.
When a score of 90 can be achieved and the manager only achieves 85, then the managed system is suboptimum. Only when objectives are known and an index to the working system is computable can this be known. "Close enough for government work" is a humorous expression, potentially sound if based on statistical rules, but atrocious if it is an expression of an attitude tolerating suboptimization.
As computer program after program is run and it dawns upon the manager how difficult it is to guess at right answers, how often secondary effects countermand great altruism, how systems respond sensitively to unexpected factors, and how curvilinear phenomena and step phenomena can thwart perfectly logical tactics, a sound managerial attitude evolves. It behooves every manager to develop a profound regard for suboptimization. It is the manager's equivalent to the concept of entropy in ecosystems.
Maximizing Information
In faunal resource systems, an amazing, virtually unexplored, number of correlations exist. If you know X, you may be able to estimate dozens of other parameters and rates. The manager seeks to maximize information from observations. In forestry, the relations of "basal area" of a stand to many phenomena are well known (e.g., biomass, volume, canopy cover, understory light, evapotranspiration). Elevations of map cells in a computer mapping system are the basis for computing location of watersheds, boundaries, stream channels, slope, aspect, land form, and topographic shadow. Lanciani (1987) showed that many population properties are calculable when the number of female survivors in each age class is known along with the total female offspring produced by all females in each age class. Experienced people sense or know these relations. They need to be formalized, built into models, and data requirements reduced. Experienced field people have internalized these correlations. A few key observations provide enormous amount of information for decision-making. Experience is often missing due to a manager's age or having been moved around to different areas by an agency. It becomes increasingly important to find the correlations and create models that can help when informed experience is in short supply.
Experience
By definition of youth, young people do not have experience. Everyone seeks it; the importance of having it is denied by all without it. Experience can mean "practicing wrong for years." It can also mean the synthesis of abundant, diverse observations and trials into a functional, efficient pattern of thought and action likely to produce generally desirable results with minimum conflict. High quality experience is very difficult to obtain. The "career ladders" idea is used in some natural resource agencies. People are encouraged to move up the ladder. Moves may be diversifying and educational or merely costly to an agency and to the forest faunal resource. In some computer games (e.g., CAP17) the management of an area can rarely be mastered in less than 7 "plays." If a play is like a year on a wildlife management area, it may take 5 to 10 years to learn an area well enough to become effective in decision making. Experience is needed and techniques are needed to get knowledge of forest systems fast and to preserve it.
Educational opportunities need to be created to allow experience to be transmitted and gained. New publications are needed, TV-recorded show-me trips circulated, field discussions planned, new record keeping done (particularly related to geographic information systems), and problem-based training sessions (with actors and role-playing) conducted. Experience with large complex systems is essential. There are ways to get the required knowledge for management faster, more effectively, more consistently than one year at a time (Hilborn 1992).
A list of things that faunal system managers do in the field (also CAP5007) has been prepared. It can and should be expanded. Almost all of the suggestions can be used to reduce, stabilize or increase populations, perhaps related benefits. Each area, each situation, each group of people is unique. "Just tell us what to do" is demanded by the naive student. " It depends", is one answer. The other is a selection of a set of actions to be applied simultaneously with feedback.
Leadership
Benefits from faunal system management are said to be difficult to estimate. Readers will find such estimates no more difficult than making estimates of the costs of forest activity. I have tried several times. Setting costs in the field can be done, but the variance is greater than that encountered in ecological systems. I saw this only after the fact. When a manger measures work-crew size, strength, knowledge of each member, miles traveled, type of equipment, type of truck, length of rest periods, smoking policy, even working conditions (rainy-dry days or swamp vs. mountain work) he or she will conclude after a very expensive analysis that difference in output and all other performance measures is in the leadership quality of the crew chief! "Unexplained factors and high variance prevented good cost estimation models (those with a high R-square) from being developed" is a research result that provides the manager with nothing but an empty pocket. All of our ecological, technological, organizational, statistical, and other knowledge and capability fall as sand between our fingers. Leadership within the system is left as a dominant factor.
Leadership is needed in many areas, only one of which is for studied needed that are sensitive to real needs and have high probability of useful payoffs. Respect for leaders with experience declines; risk-averse committees increase; sub-optimization seems tolerable.
Rational Sloppiness
The forest faunal system manager needs as another major dimension of his or her attitude one called rational sloppiness. It is an attitude of "close-enough (followed by feedback)." It is embracing realistic precision, responsible confidence, and operational correctness. It is a perplexing concept, almost a-scientific, but one that experienced mangers will understand, neophyte managers when they are out of the university aura, will soon recognize. It is relevant to the agency as well as manager. Here, following Giles (1979) and Giles et al. (1994), it is present as a resolution following a statement of premises.
Therefore, it seems logical for the natural resource manager to adopt a mental stance of rational sloppiness, one that includes use of the median, attention to a total system rather than just precision with its parts, a multi-dimensional concept of time, attention to reasonable alpha levels for statistical sampling and drawing conclusions, and iterative work responsive to a dynamic and often stochastic system. With the managerial attitude, and the other elements of this chapter,then much of the context is created for dealing with the essential components of the faunal resource system ... of forests and elsewhere.
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