32 – Difficulties in fitting an adaptive management approach^403species (see Chapter 31). The Victorian mountain ash case study overlaid the
various cutting treatments onto an already approved logging program.
Nevertheless, the long-term monitoring component of the experiment has been,
like most long-term studies (Lindenmayer et al. 2012b), an enormous financial and
logistical challenge to maintain. The ability to change and update initial questions,
as well as add new questions, ensured that the work has maintained many elements
of management relevance over time.
Major disturbances can undermine the integrity of adaptive management but
also create opportunities for learning
The integrity of AM studies can be threatened by major natural disturbances such
as wildfires, f loods and cyclones. As outlined in the case study, half of the sites in
the AM experiment in mountain ash forests were subject to high severity wildfire
in 2009. This essentially terminated the experiment on alternative silvicultural
systems. However, major disturbances also can create important opportunities for
learning, especially if new studies are instigated soon after a perturbation has
occurred (Lindenmayer et al. 2010b). In the mountain ash forest experiment, it was
possible to use the sites of the initial study in a new comparative (quasi-
experimental) investigation to quantify the effects of post-fire (salvage) logging on
plant and animal biota (Blair et al. 2016). This demanded some changes to the
protocols employed in monitoring (i.e. adaptive monitoring; Lindenmayer and
Likens 2009), but the adoption of these proved tractable following calibration of old
versus new field methods. Such calibration of methods was critical because it is
important not to breach the integrity of long-term data streams.
Report the results of adaptive management in the scientific literature
There are undoubtedly good examples of AM that are not published, and are
therefore largely inaccessible to scientists, managers and policy makers. This makes
it difficult to promote learning about what works, and does not work, in AM.
Therefore, much greater effort is needed to document AM better in the formal
scientific literature and especially those that have focused on threatened species.
Adaptive management can be vulnerable to the vagaries of government policies
and ideology
Once established, AM studies can be vulnerable to changes in government
ideology and policy. They also may produce results with inconvenient conclusions
for government officials who do not want to change policies or management
regimes. This was certainly the case in the Victorian mountain ash case study,
where some foresters did not want to consider alternative harvesting methods to
traditional clearfelling. Indeed, despite it being clear soon after the instigation of
the AM experiment that variable retention harvesting was both operationally
feasible and safe for timber workers (Lindenmayer 2007), the practical application