Overview

Richard L. Skaggs

Lance W. Vail

Steve Shankle

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, Washington

15.1 INTRODUCTION

Modern water resource managers are constantly required to balance multiple, conflicting, incommensurate objectives in an environment characterized by high levels of uncertainty, varying data quality and availability, and competing models and approaches. The reliability of water resources management policy and decisions depends on the ability of measurements, response models, process models, and policy models to interact with each other across the variety of temporal and spatial scales each represents. It also requires a cautious, probing, adaptive approach founded on fundamental economic principles, the success of which depends upon improved understanding, predictive accuracy, and iterative performance assessment.

Over the past 2 decades, adaptive management has emerged as the advocated approach to resolve natural resource conflicts in the face of significant uncertainty. Adaptive management is a systematic and rigorous, scientifically defensible program of learning from the outcomes of management actions, accommodating change, and improving management (Walters and Holling, 1990). While advo- cated, adaptive management has proven difficult to implement due to (1) its direct and indirect costs (e.g., the costs of improved understanding through research and the political risks of potentially...