See also Aplet and Cole ( 2010) for another early description of the tripartite framework and Hunter and colleagues ( 1988) for an early thought piece on how to preserve biological diversity under changing climates. Many papers have called for a rethinking of management policy in the face of climate change-notably, Millar and colleagues ( 2007), who presented a tripartite framework (resistance–resilience–response) that was a foundational step toward RAD. (Also discarded by RAD is the concept of resilience, which too often focuses on the capacity of an ecosystem to maintain or return to a prior baseline state.)Īt one level, the RAD framework is not new. RAD instead adopts the working assumptions of ongoing directional environmental change and the likelihood of ecosystem transformations at rates that can be fast, slow, or abrupt (Williams et al. 2021, this issue) and that a central management goal is to restore systems to historical baseline states. RAD discards the prior working assumptions that ecosystems and environments are inherently stable within some historical baseline of variation (Schuurman et al. Or managers can seek to direct change, steering ecosystem transformations toward desired and away from undesired outcomes. Managers can accept change, letting changes proceed with minimal intervention. Managers can resist change, seeking to keep ecosystems in a current state, or at least slow the rates of transformation. The articles here present and explore a simple but comprehensive operational framework, called RAD (resist–accept–direct), representing three basic options that fully encompass the decision space available to managers. This special issue of BioScience represents a milestone in this paradigm shift. As Magness and colleagues ( 2021, this issue) write, ecosystems and environments are “shifting from historical baselines that are generally observable, knowable, and agreed on to nonstationary conditions that are novel, uncertain, and contested.” Given this, what is a manager to do? 2018), and management policies that assume a stable baseline no longer apply. 2008), the climate system is experiencing persistent directional change toward a state with no precedent in human history (Burke et al. Climate stationarity is dead (Milly et al. The phrase paradigm shift can be overused, but for ecosystem managers, the implications of climate change are profound. In response, the theory and operational practice of ecosystem management is undergoing a paradigm shift. As a result, ecosystems are beginning to transform (Jackson 2021), just as the Earth's biosphere was massively transformed by a 6 ☌ global warming at the end of the last ice age (Nolan et al. Phenological events are changing in timing, species are changing in abundance and distributions, novel mixtures of species are emerging, and wildfire regimes are intensifying. Sea level is rising, causing saltwater encroachment in coastal ecosystems and increased damage from hurricanes and other coastal storms. Rainfall variability is intensifying, with net increases in water availability in some regions and aridification in others, often in areas where water is already scarce. For any ecosystem manager working today, it is virtually certain that, over their entire professional career, global mean temperatures will continue to rise, with various cascading effects on the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, and the biosphere.
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