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Advances in Conservation Ecology: Paradigm Shifts of Consequence for USACE Environmental Planning, Management and Conservation Cooperation

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Advances in Conservation Ecology: Paradigm Shifts of Consequence for USACE Environmental Planning, Management and Conservation Cooperation September 2018 Advances in Conservation Ecology: Paradigm Shifts of Consequence for USACE Environmental Planning, Management and Conservation Cooperation 2018-R-05 The Institute for Water Resources (IWR) is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Field Operating Activity located within the Washington DC National Capital Region (NCR), in Alexandria, Virginia and with satellite centers in New Orleans, LA; Davis, CA; Denver, CO; and Pittsburg, PA. IWR was created in 1969 to analyze and anticipate changing water resources management conditions, and to develop planning methods and analytical tools to address economic, social, institutional, and environmental needs in water resources planning and policy. Since its inception, IWR has been a leader in the development of strategies and tools for planning and executing the USACE water resources planning and water management programs. IWR strives to improve the performance of the USACE water resources program by examining water resources problems and offering practical solutions through a wide variety of technology transfer mechanisms. In addition to hosting and leading USACE participation in national forums, these include the production of white papers, reports, workshops, training courses, guidance and manuals of practice; the development of new planning, socio-economic, and risk-based decision-support methodologies, improved hydrologic engineering methods and software tools; and the management of national waterborne commerce statistics and other Civil Works information systems. IWR serves as the USACE expertise center for integrated water resources planning and management; hydrologic engineering; collaborative planning and environmental conflict resolution; and waterborne commerce data and marine transportation systems. The Institute’s Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC), located in Davis, CA specializes in the development, documentation, training, and application of hydrologic engineering and hydrologic models. IWR’s Navigation and Civil Works Decision Support Center (NDC) and its Waterborne Commerce Statistical Center (WCSC) in New Orleans, LA, is the Corps data collection organization for waterborne commerce, vessel characteristics, port facilities, dredging information, and information on navigation locks. IWR’s Risk Management Center is a center of expertise whose mission is to manage and assess risks for dams and levee systems across USACE, to support dam and levee safety activities throughout USACE, and to develop policies, methods, tools, and systems to enhance those activities. Other enterprise centers at the Institute’s NCR office include the International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (ICIWaRM), under the auspices of UNESCO, which is a distributed, intergovernmental center established in partnership with various Universities and non-Government organizations; and the Conflict Resolution and Public Participation Center of Expertise, which includes a focus on both the processes associated with conflict resolution and the integration of public participation techniques with decision support and technical modeling. The Institute plays a prominent role within a number of the USACE technical Communities of Practice (CoP), including the Economics CoP. The Corps Chief Economist is resident at the Institute, along with a critical mass of economists, sociologists, and geographers specializing in water and natural resources investment decision support analysis and multi-criteria tradeoff techniques. The Director of IWR is Dr. Joe D. Manous, Jr., who can be contacted at: [email protected]. Additional information on IWR can be found at: http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil. IWR’s NCR mailing address is: U.S. Army Engineer Institute for Water Resources 7701 Telegraph Road, 2nd Floor Casey Building Alexandria, VA 22315-3868 Advances in Conservation Ecology: Paradigm Shifts of Consequence for USACE Environmental Planning, Management and Conservation Cooperation 2018-R-05 September 2018 Richard A. Cole, USACE Institute for Water Resources USACE Institute for Water Resources U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Recent advances in conservation ecology are changing the way federal agencies in the United States plan, manage and cooperate to achieve their missions. These advances have contributed to major changes in the widely accepted working concepts—or paradigms—that underlie widely held assumptions of ecological management. Many of these paradigm shifts occurred since Corps environmental policy and technical guidance was written and are unevenly understood among ecological managers (eco-managers). The historic highlights of these changes and some of their implications are presented here for the use of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works Program (Corps) as it adapts to climate and other environmental change. One of the most challenging aspects of Corps and other agency adaptation to new environmental legislation was protecting species and their support systems from increasing rates of extinction and restoring them to sustainable states as the environment was rapidly changing. The management demands and conflicts often seemed overwhelming, even before global climate change was widely accepted as real. The concept of ecosystem management emerged in the 1990s as an attractive alternative to species-based management, but, in its earlier incarnations in the 1990s, ecosystem management tended to rely on assumptions of long-term ecological stability and integrity that are now largely dismissed as unrealistic by ecologists and leading eco-managers in large part because of increasing awareness of past and potential climate-change effects. Other ecological paradigms were already shifting, but have shifted more quickly since global climate change has been widely accepted as real. While many eco-managers in the 1990s continued to accept a tightly organized, deterministically resilient concept of community integrity, most now believe that many species redistribute individualistically and often uncertainly in continuously changing community assemblages. Yet leading eco-managers continue to believe that many of the threatened species elements of ecosystems can be protected at and restored to more naturally sustainable abundances somewhere on the continent, if not in previous, “more natural” ecosystem assemblages and locations. Once thought to be separate from nature, ecologists and many eco-managers now generally accept human effects as pervasive and often inseparable attributes of nature (although some environmental advocates find the separation politically useful). Leading eco-managers now argue that most, if not all, ecosystems are humanly-altered and quite resistant to holistic protection and restoration of past ecosystem conditions. The old paradigms allowed a locally independent and deterministic certainty in management that has been replaced with wide acceptance of the need for forward looking, objective-guided and cooperative adaptive management. Most tenets of contemporary ecosystem management concept are generally accepted; particularly, the importance of sustaining biodiversity, defining management objectives in terms of ecosystem services, and considering species population needs and management at a wide range of ecological scales. But ecosystem management is accepted mainly in support of population-based management. Corps practitioners can do much to accommodate these changes, including possible revisions of policy and new technical guidance. Disclaimer: The contents of this report have been developed and reviewed for factual accuracy, logic and clarity, but remain the author’s interpretations and views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Institute for Water Resources, or any other agency or organization. Advances in Conservation Ecology: Paradigm Shifts of Consequence Preface and Acknowledgements During the past couple of decades, conservation ecology has rapidly advanced with new understanding of ecological processes and management needs among professional conservationists, other professional ecological managers, and ecological scientists. Since the 1990s, the profoundly disturbing reality and implications of widespread human-caused environmental change, including global climate change, has penetrated federal management of ecological resources and contributed greatly to major changes in management paradigms. Federal concern over the sustainability of the nation’s diverse plant and animal heritage became all the more worrisome during this time. Preventing its further erosion and the unsustainable use of ecological resources is a huge challenge that no single organization can cope with alone. To effectively address this problem, agencies and other organizations must communicate, cooperate and collaborate more effectively within their organizations and with other organizations through concerted efforts modeled after groups like the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) set up by the Department of the Interior from 2009 to 2017. One challenge for future eco-management cooperatives, in whatever form they may take, is simply getting all participants communicating in universally understood ecological concepts. During a previous study of Corps participation in the LCCs, it became clear that knowledge of advances in ecological science and management was uneven, both within and among organizations, and there was no digest of information available for Corps ecologists and eco-managers. The digest provided here was directed
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